I probably don’t need to tell you that Here We Are, which opened at The Shed’s Griffin Theater last night, has rather a complicated backstory. Directed by Joe Mantello, with a book by Venus in Fur playwright David Ives and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the sleek, jaunty, and occasionally pitch-black new show – which reimagines (and sutures together) two films by the surrealist Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel – was developed in fits and starts over the course of about a decade, threatening at various points to fall apart completely. Sondheim was in his 80s, and then his 90s, during this period, and he worked at his own pace – which sometimes meant not at all. The Public Theater was involved for a time, and then it wasn’t. Ives, wondering if he was somehow the problem with the production, resigned from the project in the spring of 2019, only to sign on again that October.
There was a workshop in 2017 with Kelli O’Hara and Steven Pasquale, and then a reading (and I mean reading; the actors involved were not taught the score) with Bernadette Peters, Nathan Lane, and others in 2021. As well as that went, it came as a somewhat unwelcome surprise to his collaborators when, a week later, Sondheim announced on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that his latest musical, called Square One, should be ready to open in 2022. (Ives and Mantello hadn’t even co-signed that title.) Yet when Sondheim died at home that November, it appeared to his fans and followers – at least for about a year – that the show had gone with him.
So, the news in March of this year that Sondheim’s final show, now called Here We Are, would arrive at The Shed this fall was a shock – equalled only by the later announcement of its sprawling and starry cast: Francois Battiste, Tracie Bennett, Bobby Cannavale, Micaela Diamond, Amber Gray, Jin Ha, Rachel Bay Jones, Denis O’Hare, Steven Pasquale, David Hyde Pierce, and Jeremy Shamos. After recent, dazzling revivals of Company, Assassins, Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along, and Sweeney Todd, it seemed we’d have one more (brand-new!) Sondheim score for the road.
Needless to say, the excitement around Here We Are has been… acute; between its gala and opening-night performances this past week, the show attracted a crowd including Chris Rock, Paul Rudd, Peter Dinklage, Sarah Paulson, Holland Taylor, Katie Holmes, Sara Bareilles, Cynthia Nixon, Jim Parsons, Andy Cohen, Jonathan Groff, Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford, Andrew Rannells, Josh Gad, and Jane Krakowsi. But at the eye of the storm is its company, including 24-year-old Diamond, who has had rather an extraordinary 12 months. Last November, she was opening Jason Robert Brown’s Parade at New York City Center opposite Ben Platt; now she’s a Tony nominee, originating a Sondheim role in the person of Fritz, a Greenwich-born, sexually confused revolutionary attempting to destroy the very milieu that created her. (The show’s plot otherwise goes like this: In Act I, a ragtag group of wealthy flibbertigibbets is repeatedly thwarted in their quest for brunch; in Act II, finally sated, they find themselves mysteriously unable to leave the drawing room where they’ve convened. Chaos – and the machinations of an anarchic organisation called the People’s Revolutionary Anti-Domination Army, or PRADA – ensues.)
The morning before Here We Are’s opening night, Diamond spoke to Vogue about the joys of being part of an ensemble, how she was preparing for curtain, and – of course – Sondheim. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
At this point last year, you were a few days out from Parade opening at City Center, and now you have another opening night happening… tonight. How are you dealing?
Oh, that’s such a sweet question to start with. It has been such a crazy year. I closed Parade on a Sunday night and started sight-reading Sondheim Monday morning, on one day in August. It just feels like a bit of a dream. I’ve gotten to work with [Jason Robert Brown’s] music for the first half of the year, and then Sondheim’s music for the second. I don’t know if my younger self can really believe it. Of course, they’re two makers who have changed and made their own language in our world, and so I just feel grateful. It’s like doing Shakespeare. It’s just a rare feeling to work with such incredible material.
Do you have, on opening nights, any sorts of things that you like to do to calm your nerves?
I’ll start with something that maybe I shouldn’t say, which is that I take a beta blocker, which I do think helps. [Laughs.] Then also I journal quite a bit always, if not every day, but I do journal on openings. There’s something about the process of writing down the moment before such a high that feels exciting to me, and can get maybe some of my nerves out too. I’ll tell you what I don’t do, which is peek through the curtain and see who’s sitting in the audience. That would scare the hell out of me, especially at something like this, where I’m sure there will be a lot of Sondheim-y actors in the house.
I think the last thing I’ll say is I probably just reconnect to the circumstance of our show, and they gave us a gift in that we’re done being reviewed for the week, and tonight is really a celebration of [Sondheim’s] last work. We all know the pressure of that, but we all know the privilege of that as well.
You’ve spoken already to the way that Sondheim, in a sense, created a new language, as you put it, in musical theatre. I’d love to know what your relationship to his work was before this show – when you first became aware of him, and which shows of his are especially meaningful to you.
Well, I think my favourite thing about Sondheim is that he never does the same thing twice. He breaks form and he breaks rules, and he always brings together a strange ensemble. I think, though, the one that I loved so much when I was younger was Into the Woods, and after you’ve loved and left someone, Company hits in a new way. Then once you’ve smelled success, Merrily hits in a different way. I’ve loved his music for as long as I can remember, without even understanding perhaps the core of what he was trying to say. The music itself made you feel something. I think, even with this, it’s like, I’m excited to see this one day again, and have a certain line change me in a different way than it did when I was 24, depending on what chapter I’m in in my life.
Those three shows in particular – Company, Into The Woods, and Merrily – all flitted through my mind as I saw Here We Are yesterday, for different reasons. It’s funny that you mentioned them.
I didn’t even mention Sunday in the Park with George, which is the one that I want to do the most, which maybe is telling. I think about Sunday, too, being inside of this show, because I wonder what the first audiences of Sunday thought when they got to Act II. They were probably like, What the fuck is happening? Where are we? Who are these people? Then trying to piece the puzzle together of like, Oh, the grandson. It’s this confusing new structure, and our show attempts to do that in a different way.
Were you aware of Here We Are’s slightly chaotic backstory when it came your way?
No. We all came in with such different knowledge of the piece. Some had done workshops and some, like me, had never heard a lick of music before day one. I loved hearing those stories. I loved hearing the different titles and the different ways they tried to crack it open, and being a part of the last version of it. To me, that’s not unique in the theatre. There are workshops and readings where people read your part and they added that line, and it’s all just this melting pot of creativity.
The actors who played Fritz or just read it, Bernadette reading Marianne [a part now played by Rachel Bay Jones], all of those things, I feel like they’re still inside the show. I can almost hear it in the internal rhythm of the script. So many hands have been on this piece, and so many special ones, the best ones, have been inside of it. I think some actors find that a little weird, but I find it really comfortable. It actually makes me feel safer. No, I didn’t quite know all the details, but I thought that Frank Rich article was so beautiful. The way [Mantello and Ives] broke down all the email correspondences between the three of them, and how much they all wanted to find the gem but didn’t quite know what colour it would be.
And how did you actually become involved with the show?
I got an audition a few months into Parade, and it was very secret. I had to sign an NDA and read this secret script, and they said, “We’d love to have you sing any brief Sondheim song.”
Wow.
They said, “This could be something you already know,” or they included “Another Hundred People” from Company [as an option] because it needed to be chattery and belt-y. It’s interesting because after reading this weird script that made it really hard to feel what the style was, I brought it to my coach and I think we both were just, like, I think we need to swing at this one. I think they’re going to cast people who are making big, bold, risky, weird, bizarre choices. We did, and I sang “The Miller’s Son” [from A Little Night Music] because I felt like that song actually really fit Fritz.
I was so scared, and Joe was like, “No notes. You can go.” I was like, Oh, no. That’s usually not a great thing. Then the next morning I got a call being like, “They want you to do it.” It was a totally bearable audition process. [Laughs.] I’m so glad that they ended up seeing me. I know they didn’t see a lot of people, so I’m just grateful.
And can you tell me a bit about transitioning from Parade directly into this? The shows are such completely different beasts…
I have to be honest, it was a bit hard for me. I’m really lucky that there was a long rehearsal process. I think something I’ve come back to over and over again is that I felt like Fritz was a little far from self at first. She’s this political rebel who is upper-middle class, from Greenwich, but now committed unthinkingly to the revolution. She’s angry at the world and she’s lonely and sulky and serious. She’s idealistic about the world, but ignorant about it. I think that, for some reason, that kind serious person felt far from me, but I actually think it was closer to self than I thought.
I was coming from this polite Jewish Southern woman who was also lonely and ignorant in some ways. She had a softness to her that felt like me. I don’t know anymore if that was me, or if I just loved that character so much that it penetrated who I was, which is always lovely when that happens with the right characters. With Fritz, I had to find my way to her. Lucille [Diamond’s character in Parade] was such an inside-out character, while Fritz was a little bit more outside-in. Once I put that costume on, and had the mullet wig and a nose ring and chunky, Brooklyn boots, I was able to find my way to that mask she’s wearing, that ends up coming off in Act II.
It was hard, but I’m grateful that it was an ensemble piece, because in Parade, Ben and I really carried that show. But [in Here We Are], if you don’t get the laugh, the next person will. That’s actually so delightful. And they brought together a really strange cast – some people hadn’t done a musical since high school, and some of us have really only done musicals.
But there was nothing to look at and say, Ah, that’s what we’re going to try and do. That’s the form it’ll take. We just had to create a language in the room together and ask absurd, important questions about life. When in doubt, I would look at somebody else and listen – listen to the Bishop, David Hyde Pierce, sing his song – and remember, like, Oh, there’s no glitter shit in this show. It’s just good writing and good actors making people giggle. On top of that, I get to sing the last love duet, and that to me is not hard. That to me is: Sondheim made a train, and you just have to step on. He takes you the rest of the way.
Especially in the early rehearsal period, I’m curious as to how Joe and David went about balancing what I imagine was a crazy sense of occasion, just in terms of this being Sondheim’s final show, with just getting on and doing the work. How did they talk about what their hopes were for this piece?
Joe and David started the rehearsal process by saying, “This is for us. There’s a freedom in being off-Broadway. There’s a freedom in it being not so commercial. It doesn’t have to be liked. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s cup of tea. Let’s make the show that Steve, David, and I want, and let’s make it together.” That was, I thought, a beautiful way to begin. That’s something that I don’t think actors get all the time, especially on Broadway.
In terms of the material, I do think that the movies were a source of great inspiration for everyone in the room. Act I feels structural to me. You see these rich people walking down a road, and as our stage directions say, “They’re going nowhere, as always, with brisk determination.” It grounds both the characters and the audience into the strange void that hopefully will suspend all of our disbelief for the rest of the runtime.
Act II is less structural. There’s less music. There’s less “choreography,” if you will. We create the pace. This was the challenge for us as a company in the room. We had to find our internal rhythm and perform as an orchestra, and figure out who had the solo and support that solo. I think that – speaking of the train I was talking about – David and Steve made a train, and you have to get on it quick. When we do, it’s magic.
Joe often repeats a quote by Sondheim – “Sacrifice something safe.” I think that’s what this show does. I think we’re sacrificing something safe, and not just as a whole, but within ourselves, within our characters. How can we do that every night?
There is certainly a vein of satire that runs through the material – perhaps in the first act more than the second. But ultimately, is this a hopeful show, in your mind? I feel like one reading of it is that the trap in Act II is a leveller, and by the end, the characters are just people who simply want to see their families again. Is that a correct reading? Or what do you make of it?
I don’t think I have any final reading on it. I think that it changes night to night. I think that that’s a beautiful reading. I think that you hit the nail on the head with the idea that you meet them as caricatures in Act I, and by the end of Act II, you hopefully feel something for them. You know them in a new, intimate way. You’ve seen them at their most hungry, their most horny, most desperate. There is, dare I say, a charm to the bourgeoisie. You’re still laughing in Act II, but you’re questioning why. It’s darker. I don’t know. It’s maybe a delicate farce, but I hesitate to label it, because I think that thanks to Joe, we’ve somehow figured out how to be in the same show, but that’s perhaps as far as we can go. I don’t know if we can name what the same show is. [Laughs.]
Here We Are is on through 21 January.
