FringeReview UK 2025

Stephen Sondheim, David Ives Here We Are

A Tom Kirdahy, Sue Wagner, John Johnson and The Stephen Sondheim Trust production Co-produced with The National Theatre In association with Thomas M. Neff, Mickey Liddell and Pete Shilaimon, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw

Genre: American Theater, Comedy, Dark Comedy, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Musical Theatre, Surrealism, Theatre

Venue: National Theatre, Lyttelton

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Creative collisions are rarely as fruitful as this. That’s especially when posthumous premieres are fickle and the inspiration not one but two Luis Buñuel films. But this is Stephen Sondheim, in love with film and inured to multiple collaborators since Bernstein’s Candide in 1957 – one of six previous Sondheims (counting book) the National have mounted since 1990. The last was Follies in 2017, revived 2019. From 2009 to his death in 2021 he met with dramatist David Ives to push a project with roots decades earlier with James Lapine. After its acclaimed Broadway premiere last year, Here We Are – the final name wasn’t hit on easily –  opens at the National’s Lyttelton. It’s again directed by Joe Montello till June 28^th.

It’s a must-see. Not simply because this is the last ever premiere of a Sondheim. It’s also a fascinating take on mortality and near-death, purposeless chic injected with existentialism. Being and Nothingness on Broadway. Brunch and La Nausée. Who knew?  Sondheim left his final draft for Ives as a posthumous gift. The title at least seems perfect.

A slow-burn, it’s looking for brunch and finally giving in to dinner: a fresh metaphor out of two films. That’s the start. Taking Buñuel in reverse order of making gets that before/after effect: 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie seems picaresque and that translates perhaps uneasily into Act One. Here it features a gaggle of the idle rich (“we’ve cloned the dogs”) crashing into the home of one (the Brinks) thinking they’re being fed. Brink herds them repeatedly to restaurants that fail, and an eternally-deferred dinner looms. As if someone’s riffing Derrida.

There’s Cafe Everything, that has nothing, and since the original surreality’s stripped out, it’s a series of trampings from one famishing after another. You take such famishing with a pinch of salt over your shoulder; as much as a waiter shoots himself and elsewhere a cook is revealed to be the subject of a funeral service behind curtains. But you have to eat. It’s a witty energised soufflé of an act on repeat, and it palls a little. David Zinn’s Hockney-bright set and costumes use only the walled downstage with graphics and a descending gigantic ring. By the end though we’re in the set-up for what happens next and it clicks. You’re hooked.

Act Two (pace Moss Hart, there is an Act Two, you just reverse the acts) finds The Exterminating Angel (1962). It’s a lot stronger: the aftermath of a house party (here a dodgy ambassador’s residence) with servants fled bar an English butler. Lit by Natasha Katz with a tenebrous gloom of luxury proportions, the set’s a plush pillared library and initially sumptuous fare. After gorging the diners find themselves trapped in a Twilight Zone forcefield. Camping out and eating A Tale of Two Cities over a few days strips this away. Sam Pinkleton’s elegant choreography having sashayed through Act One now finds more interesting individual numbers amidst the ruins. Nigel Lilley’s band sound as if a great Sondheim melody might break out over the two hours twenty-five that hardly drags, and never after the first 40 minutes.

Rory Kinnear’s full of verve and wit, inflecting arrogance with the affability of Bank of Dave gone New York. As entitled plutocrat Leo Brink, he corrals and complains lightly. Brink’s seemingly delighted with his delirious-seeming trophy-wife Marianne Brink (Jane Krakowski), who takes up the show’s best melody (not great, but nagging) “What a perfect day” in a radiantly ironised soprano; which tune morphs through several other characters. Their friends Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Martha Plimpton) “I’m completely undone by the abundance of life” tells you everything about high maintenance. Her husband a thousandth nose-job plastic surgeon Paul Zimmer (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, making the man faintly existential) you feel is underwritten. As if, Sondheim and Ives suggest, he’s become the plastic he smooths. There’s a couple of plastic lyrics scattered through too, but honey-barbed ones as well.

More interesting is Marianne’s younger activist sister Fritz (Chumisa Dornford-May) “self-starved” Trustafarian with a revolutionary world conscience and East Side woolly hat on a sunshine day. Dornford-May energises Fritz’s pivotal plot-points with her connections and strong sharp-inflected vocals; though you feel she’s more of a comfortable 1970s take on what activism looks like post 2010. Fritz’s revolutionary sound-bites are 50 years out of date down to the hat. The show was once going to address break-up, but Fritz in a delicious if unbelievable irony falls for one of the enemy – a bit Patty Hearst without the Stockholm Syndrome. This is the unnamed Soldier after the traipsing troop somehow attract the ire of the military. Richard Fleeshman’s Soldier provides some fine duetting, their recits and arias are ardent, faintly bitter-sweet and with such singing from Dornford-May. Their story should matter a bit more and so should Fritz. This isn’t France any more.

With Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Paolo Szot in memorable voice), we get a baritone-basso operatic voice of substance: a man with secrets larger than the palatial residence he takes them all to. There’s more character in Colonel Martin (Cameron Johnson making a slow monument of military doubt), and the  Bishop (Harry Hadden-Paton). Who reminds us that on press night that Sondheim was baptised as it were with news of another American bishop then Cardinal. I’ve noticed every significant show seems to synch with a major event. Sondheim would have loved it.

Tracie Bennett as a shape-shifting Woman is almost luxury casting and Bennett makes a fizzing caricature out of various Maitresse D’ roles. Equally Denis O’Hare’s Man, as hard-pressed every time. However O’Hare as English Waiter wields a secret and his transformation takes us back, again to the 1970s.

Altogether this mightn’t be in the top tier of Sondheim musicals, but it’s one of the most interesting, even profound, and Sondheim exits with a rapt question-mark. Unmissable.

Musicians conducted by Nigel Lilley – Jonathan Tunick’s and Alexander Gemignani’s orchestrations

Movement Director Shelley Maxwell, Sound Designer Tom Gibbons, Hair, Wigs and Make-up Designer Robert Pickens and Katie Gell, Casting Bryony Jarvis-Taylor CDG, Dialect Coach Caitlin Stegemoller,

Associate Director Lily Dyble, Associate Set and Designer Tim McMath,  Associate Costume Designer Rachael Ryan, Associate Choreographer Billy Bustamante, Associate Conductor Cat Beveridge, Associate Lighting Designer Craig Stelzenmuller, Associate Sound Designer James Melling

Published May 13, 2025 by Simon Jenner