Here We Are
National Theatre, London, until June 28

As great as Stephen Sondheim undoubtedly was, occasionally – like Shakespeare – he would produce work that was a lot less great than normal. Here We Are is the composer’s Two Gentlemen of Verona: seldom the subject of much enthusiasm even by his most devoted fans.

Released posthumously, it is a musical with no songs, no story and even the music it has peters out in the second act. It begins relatively amusingly with Rory Kinnear playing a trendy New Yorker trying in vain to find a trendy New York restaurant to entertain his trendy friends.

The sets by David Zinn are impressive and no doubt very expensive, and Kinnear’s presence raises hopes that it may turn out to be a lot less vacuous than it at first appears, but sadly, it proves to be a forlorn hope. 

Sondheim struggled to make the show work for a decade with the writer David Ives and director Joe Mantello, but died in 2021 at the age of 91 with it still unfinished.

The National Theatre and Mantello aren’t doing Sondheim any favours reviving this bewildering and boring work, completed without him around, and one would have thought the National’s outgoing artistic director, Rufus Norris, would want to go out with more of a bang. Roll on Indhu Rubasingham’s inaugural season.