‘Here We Are’ review: Sondheim’s last musical sadly doesn’t sing
nypost.comWhat’s missed everywhere is passion. In Sondheim’s other experimental musicals — “Assassins,” profiling presidential killers, and “Sunday In The Park With George,” about Georges Seurat’s famous painting — heat arrives in the most unexpected ways and places.
The sound of “Here We Are,” however, lands on either soothing or silly, always.And there’s not much to hear at all in Act 2, a take on the movie “The Exterminating Angel” that begins with a scenic stunner (set by David Zinn), as the friends from Act 1 become trapped in the Miranda embassy and are mysteriously unable to leave.By now they’ve been joined by David Hyde Pierce as the Bishop, who dryly confides, “I’m a terrible priest,” and Francois Battiste as Colonel Martin.
The always fabulous Jones, whose Marianne is a self-satisfied dimwit, starts the act off crooning about the joys of superficiality and utters one of the few lyrics that calls back to Sondheim at his best: “I don’t need to read between the lines — the lines are just fine.”Then the show becomes all lines.Tedious lines, at that.
Talk of drug cartels and retro revolutionary terrorists is contorted into a somewhat important plot point, but comes off superfluous all the same.Ives’ scenes in the embassy of Miranda meander and peter out, even as the denizens’ behavior turns animalistic, and the audience is distracted by moments in which never-written duets and ballads were clearly meant to have been placed.
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