Stephen Sondheim’s swansong musical is barely a musical at all. A play by David Ives with music by Sondheim is perhaps the more appropriate description. Or a devilishly clever absurdist adaptation of two Luis Buñuel films rolled into one is another way of putting it.
The Oscar-winning Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), about a group of well-to-do and increasingly hungry friends who find the brunch they have met to eat repeatedly eludes them as they move from eatery to eatery, dominates the first act. The second segues into the Exterminating Angel (1962), a darker tale about an opulent dinner party which the guests find they cannot leave.
If this show feels musically unfinished, Joe Mantello’s production, which was previously seen in New York, does much to distract from the fact with a British/American starry cast that includes Rory Kinnear, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Jane Krakowski, who play achingly smug and shallow urbanites who want for nothing.
To give you an idea of their disconnect from real-world problems, Kinnear’s tycoon Leo is planning to clone his dogs so he no longer needs to go to the trouble of transporting them between multiple homes. What befalls these people and their utterly self-involved way of looking at the world is both deserved and well observed. Certainly well observed enough to make today’s equivalent of Buñuel’s bourgeoisie shift uncomfortably in their seats, if, that is, they have the self-awareness to see themselves.
What befalls these people and their utterly self-involved way of looking at the world is both deserved and well observed
The sharp musical phrases echo such Sondheim classics as Company and Into The Woods. And the lyrics in the songs that reflect the perfection of everyone’s lives, drip with an irony that is both characteristic and slightly contemptuous.
There is wordplay here that matches the lyrics of some of the maestro’s best-known songs, such as I’m Still Here, which contains the irresistible line: “I’ve careered from career to career”. This show’s version involves a French waiter who, describing his menu, offers beef with the promise: “We have boeuf, that is actual boeuf, on the actual hoeuf.” Yet this lyrical and musical wit is not sustained in the second half and the impression remains of a show that Sondheim only half-wrote before his death in 2021. Still, Ives’s terrific book has turned Buñuel’s films into an evening that is not only eerily modern, but reflective of our seemingly pre-apocalyptic times.
Here We Are
National Theatre
★★★★
