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.
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.
Like so much Sondheim, the show makes demands on an audience - but "not demands you can't meet," as an earlier lyric from the same composer (in Merrily We Roll Along) puts it. There's fun to be had in wordplay about " a lotta latte" that could only come from this composer-lyricist's pen, and the triple rhyme of "duck / luck / fuck" is quintessential Sondheim. More pertinent is the show's embrace of darkness, which Mantello's genius manages somehow to keep as featherweight as Marianne's outfits. (The surpassingly witty designer is David Zinn.) Gazing ominously above, as if waiting for an Into the Woods-adjacent Giant, Ferguson's Paul cowers under the absence of the very Eden blithely insisted upon by Marianne. And the smitten young lovers sing unabashedly of "the end of the world", leaving the more philosophical Bishop to ruminate upon "matter that matters, or not".
| 2023 | Off-Broadway |
The Shed Off-Broadway Premiere Production Off-Broadway |
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
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