SONDHEIM'S FINAL WORK IS HERE

Our own Lenny Beer and his (much) better half, Suzi Dietz, are co-producers of Here We Are, the final Sondheim musical, which has opened at The Shed in NYC and earned a strong review in The New York Times.

The show, co-written by playwright David Ives and produced by Tom Kirdahy, Sue Wagner, John Johnson and the Stephen Sondheim Trust, interlaces the stories from two films by fierce Spanish satirist and icon of surrealism Luis Buñuel into a horrific comedy of privilege and social collapse; the show is studded with the ultimate compositions from Broadway legend Sondheim, who died in 2021. The Times' Jesse Green finds that the Joe Mantello-helmed production "succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive." The cast of stage and screen luminaries includes Tracie Bennett, Bobby Cannavale, Micaela Diamond, Amber Gray, Denis O’Hare, Steven Pasquale, David Hyde Pierce and Jeremy Shamos.

We mention this in part because Sondheim heads will want to catch this show as soon as possible, and also because something wholly unexpected has occurred: HITS is actually mentioned in Playbill. What this may bode for the American theater we dare not speculate, but we imagine it will be something fittingly surreal.