"Brunch. That was the fatal mistake. As always"
At the end of his life, Stephen Sondheim has evidently remained a lover of peculiar adaptation and experimenting with structure. Here We Are, his final musical with a book by David Ives, borrows the plot of two films written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel: The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoise (1972.) Buñuel is described as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time, famous for avant-garde surrealism work infused with political commentary. Adapting these films symbolizes a thematic and stylistic jump for Sondheim and represents a structural experiment that excites me.
Act I of Here We Are (inspired by The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise) tells the story of six wealthy friends attempting to have brunch. Their meal is repeatedly interrupted by increasingly outlandish obstacles, such as a chef's funeral and a pervasive famine. Act II (inspired by Exterminating Angel) finds those same friends (along with added guests, including an aimless bishop and a couple of clueless soldiers) recovering from their lavish dinner in the sitting room. All is fun and games until they realize that they can't leave. Societal rules are flipped on their head as the innumerable hours pass.
I don't mean to evaluate the quality of Ives and Sondheim's adaptation. I was unaware of Buñuel's work, so I experienced a lot of Here We Are's themes and plot points for the first time. After researching the films, I feel that the adaptation presents a neutered version of Buñuel's work, which, when exploring the devolution of the Bourgeoise, features numerous sex scandals, group suicide, and murder. The adaptation also includes a new
archetype, Fritz, who represents the Gen Z pseudo-revolutionary. The usage of this character takes the revolutionary undertones of the original and makes them a part of the explicit plot. It operates almost as "Chekhov's revolution" -- you can't entirely lose yourself in the trappings of the well-to-do because you're waiting for whatever the hell revolution that Fritz is talking about all the time. The musical is a 90-year-old American white man's attempt to investigate the frivolity of his privilege, so it doesn't really say anything.
But we aren't here to talk about Sondheim's politics. As a relatively commercial musical, Here We Are was surprisingly explicitly avant-garde. Being one of the most famous composers seems to have given Sondheim a little wiggle room to play stylistically. The avant-garde theatrical movement was a rebellion against "traditional" storytelling like melodrama and romance drama, which were identified as theater of the Bourgeois, who, as audience members, were assuaged as a passive audience. Theater practitioners like Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal experimented with that audience relationship. Through inventive theatrical forms, they urged their patrons to consider their place in society. Theater of the Absurd, specifically, was born out of the existentialism of living during World War II. European writers like Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco wrote from lands ravaged by war. American writers have been experimenting with that same level of existentialism, though we have not experienced a war on our soil in centuries. Antoinette Nwandu explored the existentialism of Black America in her play Pass/Over, which centers on two Black men trapped on a street corner, unable to escape. Sondheim and Ives introduce a new form of absurdism, where the trapped believe they live in bliss.
The affluent leads of Here We Are are blissfully unaware of the prison in which capitalism has trapped them. The character Leo Brink, portrayed by Bobby Cannavale, has become one of the wealthiest men in New York after having started from nothing, akin to the American Dream. The play then reveals two downfalls of that dream. First, Brink had to commit a heinous act of violence to start his triumphant ascension. Secondly, he is left with nothing. If the goal of life is financial success, once you've achieved that success, you can either become a Black Hole never satisfied or an empty husk with nothing left to live for. Once trapped and at the end of his life, Brink reveals that, like his wealthy peers, he has wasted his life in the quest for financial gain.
The "humanizing the rich" narrative is tired, but how Sondheim uses music to illustrate the prison of affluent redundancy was the most exciting thing about the musical. Because the characters have no "need," they don't speak to each other. They merely flaunt themselves in front of each other. The dialogue and music highlight this by crafting moments in which the characters are trapped in conversations and melody lines travel in circles without reaching a satisfying musical resolution. They're speaking past each other
rather than to each other. Furthermore, Sondheim demonstrates a lack of introspection by withholding proper "songs" from the score. While famous for pieces that aren't "hummable," it's unlike him to write a musical without at least one solo that acts as an aria and solidifies an actor as a grand dame of the stage (I'm looking at you "Send in the Clowns" or "Everybody Says Don't") With an iconic career behind him and the Pearly Gates in front of him, the old dog isn't afraid of trying out some new tricks. The musical's exploration of the nonsensical relationship between the upper class is expertly demonstrated by movement. Sam Pinkleton's choreography brilliantly highlights this by utilizing the grid of the square stage. Each sequence starts with the actors walking downstage, united in a single line. Then, they quickly devolve into small groups, walking in parallel lines of each other. Though they all occupy the same space, Pinkleton's movement displays how their conversation resists communication. Pinkleton also experiments with the quality of the actors' pedestrian movement to further exemplify the characters' absurdity. Claudia Bursik-Zimmer, portrayed by Amber Gray, always walked with a bounce in her step and shaking her wrists. In contrast, Marrianne Brink, performed by Rachel Bay Jones, exclusively flitted around the stage, making her neglige billow behind her as she glides. This movement makes it clear that these are not the kind of people you'll see walking down the street, even on the Upper East Side. They're larger than life, and perhaps their financial success allowed them to detach from their humanity.
We might be in search of a new avant-garde movement in musical theatre. Are Back to the Future and Some Like It Hot Broadway's versions of theatre meant to assuage the Bourgeoise? Though Stephen Sondheim and David Ives are hardly the voice of the revolution, Here We Are provides an example of how traditional musical theatre elements can be manipulated to explore themes experimentally. Hopefully, Sondheim's commercial appeal doesn't cloud the fact that he has always been at the forefront of progressivism (when it comes to theatrical structure). We can take his final contribution to the theater industry as a challenge to take the baton and push the field forward.
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