This is Sondheim’s last musical, the one on which he was still working when he died. His collaborators did a little more work on the book, but these are Sondheim’s music and lyrics.
Sondheim’s original inspiration lay in the films of Luis Buñuel. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie provides ideas for the first half of Here We Are as a group of wealthy friends go in search of a meal, and The Exterminating Angel providing the situation into which it puts the same group for the second act.
The curtain is up, and a covey of cleaners in black and white servant dress are vacuuming the floor and polishing the mirrored surfaces of David Zinn’s set as the audience take their seats before they meet filthy rich, track-suited Leo Brink (Rory Kinnear) and his interior designer wife Marianne (Jane Krakowski). They have forgotten they invited friends for brunch.
Or is it celebrity publicist Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Martha Plimpton) and her plastic surgeon husband Paul (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) who have got the date wrong? They have turned up along with Marianne’s sister, revolutionary environmentalist Fritz (Chumisa Dornford-May), and Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Paul Slot), the ambassador of a South American banana republic.
With nothing prepared and no chef in the kitchen, Leo invites them all out to a restaurant, and they form a line upstage to represent their car ride in what will become a repeated “Back to the Car” call.
They arrive at the Everything Cafe, celebrated for its extensive menu, where they are greeted by a waiter (Denis O’Hare), who deliciously delivers the show’s first real number (arguably its best one) regaling them with delicacies but regretfully responding to every order that it is not available.
They don’t have any better luck at the upmarket French Bistro, which its proprietress (Tracie Bennett) informs them has switched from a deconstructed dish menu to post-deconstructed one. They don’t have any food because everyone is holding a wake in a back room over the former proprietor’s body.
The Osteria Zeno is equally unable to provide food, but it is there they are joined by Colonel Martin (Cameron Johnson) of the Department of Homeland Security and his assistant Lieutenant (Richard Fleeshman) who are on the track of a drug cartel (though they don’t know that some of this party of diners are involved in it).
Giving up on restaurants, Raffael, the ambassador from mythical Miranda, invites them all back to his embassy where they dine in classical splendour, by now joined by a bishop (Harry Hadden-Paton) with a shoe fetish who is looking for a new job. They are attended by a butler who, when they move into another black-walled room and they begin to sense danger, turns out to have a connection with champagne revolutionary Fritz, while Fritz has fallen for the US Lieutenant.
With its contrived plot, mingling satire with the surreal, We Are Here is most notable for its consistently positive performances from both the monied bourgeoisie and the waiters and servants (all played by Bennett and O’Hare). These creations are characters rather than real people—indeed at one point, noticing the audience, they realise they are in a play. Even the romantic attachment between the soldier and Fritz seems to be deliberately disrupted, as ephemeral as the bear who appears in the darkness, though Fleeshman’s delivery of a dream is a highlight of the second act.
This isn’t sharp political satire; it sets out just to make you laugh, not to man (or woman) the barricades. Though the second act (deliberately) has few songs, the whole score is characteristic Sondheim with lively lyrics having rhymes that are typically intriguing and some quirky ideas such as cloned house pets.
Not at the top of the Sondheim oeuvre, Here We Are is enjoyable, fun, stylishly staged (and cleverly lit by Natasha Katz, all those mirrors must have posed quite α challenge), the band great and Tom Gibbons’s sound made every word crystal clear on the Lyttelton’s loop which I was trying out.