Stephen Sondheim’s ‘cool, and impossibly chic’ (New York Times Critic’s Pick) final work is directed by two-time Tony Award-winner Joe Mantello with book by Tony Award-nominee David Ives.
At its worst David Ives’ book is a single punchline Monty Python sketch dragged out into an entire musical – that punchline being that the one percenters barely possess a brain cell between them. I suppose an American audience might find their ignorance endearing. Though I can’t speak on behalf of the entire press night audience, I sense from the stony faces around me that the British counterparts just find them grating.
There is an immediate, and fundamental, problem: not only are these shallow idiots – here a bunch of vacuous urbanites in search of a place to have brunch – too thinly drawn to feel properly human, but there’s not a single compelling or convincing relationship between them. Obviously, the piece is highly stylised in an effort to replicate Bunuel’s off-the-wall aesthetic. But – in a slick, soulless production by director Joe Mantello – as theatre, it makes pretty thin gruel, leaving us as hungry and dissatisfied as the show’s perpetually frustrated posse.
| 2023 | Off-Broadway |
The Shed Off-Broadway Premiere Production Off-Broadway |
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
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