Stephen Sondheim’s self-reverential Right here We Are
Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim notoriously resisted the concept his musicals have been operas. He would recoil at any comparability between his rating for Right here We Are, the present he was nonetheless tweaking at his demise two years in the past, and Verdi’s for Falstaff, however it retains nagging at me.
I’m not the one opera lover who would possibly argue that Sweeney Todd, Sunday within the Park with George and Ardour are clearly operatic. Right here We Are, nonetheless, decidedly shouldn’t be. It’s a musical, although hardly an bizarre one. What the music shares with Falstaff is that a lot of it’s self-referential. Each Verdi and Sondheim mock themselves – and us – by peppering the rating with references to their earlier works.
As a longtime admirer of Sondheim’s music in addition to his incomparable lyrics, I made it a degree to see the present, which opened in October in a restricted, off-Broadway run at The Shed in New York.
Theatre critics appreciated the taut e-book by David Ives, which inserts collectively a primary act primarily based on The Discreet Attraction of the Bourgeoisie with a second act on The Exterminating Angel, two Sixties absurdist, darkly comedian movies by the director Luis Buñuel. Each the movies and the present skewer the wealthy and highly effective, who discover themselves helpless when the tables are turned. Within the play, circumstances thwart a merry band of privileged New Yorkers of their serial efforts to eat brunch; the group finally ends up eating in a diplomat’s posh house, which they’re mysteriously unable to depart.
Two months into the run, a Google search nonetheless finds no commentary of any depth on the music, That’s too dangerous, as a result of the rating is extraordinary on a number of ranges, not least as a result of so many moments really feel oddly acquainted. Not fairly direct quotations, they nonetheless think of parts of Sondheim’s earlier musicals.
When opinions famous this, they wrote it off as Sondheim being Sondheim. And sure, musical-theater composers make use of favourite compositional tropes virtually reflexively. Puccini preferred to swell the music on climaxes a sure means that’s immediately identifiable (and which Andrew Lloyd Webber stole shamelessly). Gershwin had favourite jazz-like licks that discovered their means into his music. Wagner employed his personal rhythms and harmonic sonorities which amounted to all-purpose signatures.
Each Sondheim and Verdi excel at discovering musical gestures that match the phrases and the scenes they have been written for, increasing these musical descriptions within the second. Midway by means of Act I, although, it dawned on me that Sondheim was deliberately parodying himself, persistently trying again. And it was simply these connections that tantalized me probably the most about Sondheim’s references.
Alas, Sondheim’s rating shouldn’t be accessible to check, neither is there (but) an official, original-cast recording to hearken to. I did, nonetheless, get my palms on a replica of the script, and a pirated recording to match up no less than a few of these connections. A buddy who is aware of Sondheim’s less-popular works way more totally than I do referred to as them ‘echoes of all his earlier compositions scrambled right into a soufflé’. Once I requested him which of them, he stated, ‘all of them’, and talked about a number of such lesser-known works akin to Assassins, Merrily We Roll Alongside, Night Primrose and Street Present.
Verdi quoted just about each one in all his theatrical works in Falstaff, and I believe Sondheim did right here too.
As one instance, a number of main theatre critics homed in on this scrumptious lyric: ‘We do anticipate somewhat latte later, However we haven’t acquired a lotta latte now’. However my ear perked up at a later level in the identical track, when the music for these traces from the waiter’s track – ‘Proper, who had the duck? You’re out of luck’ – referred to as to thoughts the satirical ‘A Little Priest’ from Sweeney Todd. Full factors for anybody who acknowledges that ‘A Little Priest’ was about how the flavors of the pies Mrs. Lovett constructed from Sweeney’s homicide victims fluctuate in response to the occupations of the deceased. Additionally, Sweeney is concerning the downtrodden getting revenge on the rich, a key facet of Right here We Are.
A torch track later in Act I, sung by the surviving partner of a murdered chef, units the lyric ‘Typically you need an excessive amount of, Too quickly – After which it’s too late’ to music paying homage to the anthem ‘I’m nonetheless right here’ from Follies, which was sung by a trouper recounting travails she overcame to outlive.
Arguably, the brand new musical’s best-crafted quantity is a duet for a politically radical, sexually ambiguous teenager hopelessly lovestruck by a good-looking younger military officer. In it I heard an virtually an identical melody and rhythm from ‘On the Steps of the Palace’, Cinderella’s track as she leaves the ball in Into the Woods. That makes good sense, as each characters are at a crossroads, having to resolve which course to soak up life.
Music resembling a line sung by Dot, the artist Seurat’s muse in Sunday within the Park With George, infuses phrases sung by Marianne, the blond bombshell spouse of a rich blowhard as she appreciates the poshness of the diplomat’s eating room: ‘Blessed with this – Blessed with these – All this magnificence that’s ours’. A couple of minutes later, because the soldier fixates on the teenage radical, Sondheim’s underscore borrows from the vamp that precedes the choral hymn ‘Sunday’. Not solely does it think of a second of magnificence because the portray comes collectively in actual time on stage, it aptly connects girls who each entrance and encourage males.
Verdi’s rating for Falstaff teems with such telling, if self-mocking, moments. When the ladies describe the fats evening’s heftiness, they sing ‘Falstaff immense’ to the identical music because the phrase ‘immenso Ptah’ in Aida, and the orchestra swells. When Falstaff thinks he’s going to have an assignation he puffs himself up with a light-footed arietta, launched with music from Iago’s ‘Credo’ in Otello.
These particulars amplify the message of Falstaff – that we will all be mocked (because the title character sings within the choral fugue that ends the opera). In Sondheim’s piece, the privileged socialites who set out for brunch in Act I can’t escape their very own selves in Act II, trapped in decaying luxurious because the world explodes round them. With these fleeting musical self-references, each composers remind us all that we regularly can’t assist doing the identical factor even once we know higher.
In Joe Mantello’s ingenious manufacturing, numerous mirrors round a thrust stage remind us that we’re in some methods characters out of Buñuel’s absurdist movies. Within the solid, Bobby Cannavale bosses round a herd of self-satisfied A-listers searching for brunch, amongst them Rachel Bay Jones as a spouse who’s smarter than she seems to be. David Hyde Pierce, with impeccable timing and phrasing, embodies a louche, piano-playing bishop who has an insatiable foot fetish. Veteran actors Tracie Benett and Denis O’Hare contribute all-purpose roles as servants, maids or waiters.
The music advantages from Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, and conductor Alexander Gemignani, who put the ending touches on this rating. He’s the son of Paul Gemignani, who carried out most of Sondheim’s most distinguished musicals, from A Little Evening Music to Sunday within the Park with George.
The present is scheduled to run in New York by means of 21 January.
Harvey Steiman
