A strange, dark, fragmented, and compelling final message from the master.
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asks the anarchist Emma Goldman in Sondheim and John WeidmansAssassins.
The play has sharp, savage urges, springing from its sense of injustice.
(Director Joe Mantello has been on board helping to develop the show since 2016.)
Their only goal has been to eat; now theyre left with nothing to consume but themselves.
What does he do?
; and on the other side, the sentimental: Well, at least we alllearnedsomething about ourselves.
But what an astounding set of performances!
What a striking, protean mise-en-scene!
Whats wrong with superficial?
sings Marianne:
I want things to shine
Is that so bizarre?
I want things to gleam, / To be what they seem, / And not what they are.
Unlike everyone else in her cohort, including her revolution-heralding sister, she is empty of cynicism.
Is it a dream, or is it some strange, tilted reality?
According to the creators, this shiftand its a dramatic oneis intentional.
The intellectual justification for bleeding the music from the play as it progresses holds up.
But then, one can learn to intellectually justify pretty much anything; thats what grad school is for.
What would have been theun-conventional musical-theater way forward forHere We Are?
He has turned up unexpectedly, just before the existential lockdown why?
Because, as Pierce sing-splains in high understated-comic form, hes looking for a new job.
(Of course he is: This world is godless, faithless, spiritless, conscienceless.
Who needs a little priest?)
(The classics, remarks the bishop with mild appreciation, Always nourishing now literally so.)
Well, he goes on, coughing a bit.
First of all you might say were here.
As are other people, and also objects…. And that means something.
We mean something, apparently.
We are what you might call matter that matters.
Depending on who you read.
Pierces touch is delicate, and Jones is radiant with glad attention.
Or, as Mantello has pointed out, a waiter setting a plate down in front of someone.
(you’ve got the option to just imagine Sondheim giggling over hisBlackwing.)
It is what it is.
/ Things are what they are.
/ La vie est la vie.
(The leatherbound books, the colorful cast of affluent characters, the menace, the butler…
Sometimes its like a surrealistClue.)
Shes an anarchist, but she falls for law and order.
As Bennetts waitress says, it is what it is.
Its also a formal issue: Theater humanizes.
If its sometimes a muddled impulse, its also a humane one.
Sondheim certainly didnt go gentle into the apocalypse of late capitalism, but he didnt go heartless either.
He gave us more to see.
Here We Areis at the Shed through January 21.
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