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    Stephen Sondheim’s Final Musical is Opening. How Complete Was It?

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    Sondheim said days before his death in 2021 that he did not know when it would be finished, but the musical, now called “Here We Are,” begins performances Thursday.Stephen Sondheim, asked days before his death if he had any sense of when his final musical would be finished, offered a simple answer: “No.”The great composer and lyricist, who was 91 at the time, in late 2021, had been working on and off for years on the show, which was adapted from two Luis Buñuel films. He had written songs for the first act but was struggling with the second. “I’m a procrastinator,” he told me then. “I need a collaborator who pushes me, who gets impatient.”Now, two years after his death, the show, which Sondheim had been calling “Square One” but which was later renamed “Here We Are,” is being presented for the first time, in a 526-seat theater at the Shed, a nonprofit cultural center in Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan. Performances of the show, which is based on Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” and billed as “the final musical by composer Stephen Sondheim,” are set to begin Thursday and to run until January,So what changed? How did a show that Team Sondheim suggested was incomplete at the time of his death get to a point where it was ready for public consumption?The show’s creative and producing team say that two months before Sondheim’s death, he had agreed to let the show go forward, following a successful reading of the material that existed at that point. They had come up with a rationale for a second act that is light on songs. And they note that, following that reading, Sondheim had appeared on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show and had said, “We had a reading of it last week and we were encouraged. So we’re going to go ahead with it, and with any luck we’re going to get it on next season.”So is the show being staged a finished musical? “Who would consider a musical ‘finished’ until it has gone through a full preview process?” the show’s producing and creative team said in written responses to questions for this article. “What we are putting on stage now is as finished as any production about to play its first preview. It’s ready for audiences, and very much the musical Steve envisioned.”The creative team said that all of the show’s songs, and all of its lyrics, were written by Sondheim, and that “as is the case with every musical, the orchestrator and arranger take the composer’s melodies and motifs and use them to arrange and orchestrate the instrumental interstitial music.”The musical will be based in part on Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Rialto Pictures“There isn’t a note in this score that wasn’t born out of Steve’s compositions, as will be abundantly clear to audiences,” they said.The book, on the other hand, has been revised since Sondheim’s death by its writer, David Ives, and director, Joe Mantello. But the team said that “the three collaborators agreed after the informal reading that took place on Sept. 8, 2021, that Steve’s songwriting for both acts was complete.”There is a long history of work in various stages of completion being released after the death of an artist. Mozart’s Requiem, Puccini’s “Turandot” and Berg’s “Lulu” were all left unfinished when their composers died and are now considered classics.“The work that David and Stephen did should absolutely be seen,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which was working with Sondheim to develop the show until a few years ago. “It’s a jewel, it’s small, it’s incomplete, but it’s absolutely delightful and smart and gorgeous, and it would be a crime for it not to be seen. So I’m entirely in favor of the work being shown in public.”James Lapine, who as a librettist collaborated with Sondheim on shows including “Into the Woods” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” agreed. “I really trust David and Joe, and don’t think they would be putting up something they didn’t feel was finished — not on this scale,” he said. “They’re smart cookies, and if they wanted to do a workshop because it wasn’t finished, they could. But they see it as finished, and Steve gave his blessing, so it’s going to be an addition to the canon.”The show, in Sondheim’s pithy description in that last interview, has a “so-called plot” in which “the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”When Sondheim seemed stymied by the second act, Ives and Mantello suggested that perhaps, once the characters are trapped, they can no longer sing.“Hopefully it won’t feel unfinished,” said the actor Nathan Lane, who took part in the 2021 reading. “It makes sense that these characters, once they’re trapped, they can’t sing any more.”“Here We Are,” like many new musicals, has had a complicated developmental journey.Long before he appeared on Colbert’s show, Sondheim had made suggestions that a production could be imminent. In 2014, during an appearance at the New York Film Festival, Sondheim said that he and Ives had just finished a first draft. In 2016, the producer Scott Rudin, who had been consulting with Sondheim about the show, told the “Fresh Air” interviewer Terry Gross that he hoped it would be staged in 2017. Two months later Sondheim, speaking at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., said he also hoped the show would be staged in 2017, “if I can finish the score in time.”Sondheim had been working on the project off and on for years. Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesThere was a reading and three workshops before the pandemic — all led by the Public Theater — but no productions.“My impression was that Steve hadn’t finished it in his mind to where he wanted it to be exactly, but an unfinished Sondheim song still sounds like a pretty amazing song,” said Michael Cerveris, an actor who took part in two readings at the Public.At one point Sondheim set aside work on the musical; he and Ives returned to another project, called “All Together Now,” and the Public’s rights to the Buñuel films lapsed.Then Mantello and Ives pulled together the 2021 reading, with a starry cast led by Lane and Bernadette Peters. The reading was a one-afternoon event, with no singing — the assembled actors read the words of the script and the song.“It was two acts, and the lyrics were witty and clever, unsurprisingly,” Lane said. Sondheim, he said, “had written an act and the beginning of the second act, and there was some material in the script that was suggesting perhaps he might turn some long monologue into a song — I wasn’t privy to those conversations.”There is uncertainty among some Sondheim biographers about how to view this show.“I’m both eager and apprehensive,” said Daniel Okrent, who is writing a book about Sondheim. “I’m eager because I so admire his work, and I’m apprehensive because of his public statements that suggested he wasn’t very happy with what he had done, or that he didn’t think it was complete.”Several people who spoke with Sondheim in his final years said they were surprised by the turn of events. “He thought it was never going to happen,” said the director Ivo van Hove, who spent time with Sondheim while directing a 2020 Broadway revival of “West Side Story,” “but it’s happening now.”Others would like more transparency from the creative team about how they have pulled this show together, a process partly described by Frank Rich in New York magazine.“I think we’d all like to know more about how the sausage was made, especially the second act sausage,” said D.T. Max, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Finale: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim.”Sondheim was known for revising many of his shows throughout the preview process, which makes this one unusual. (He wrote “Comedy Tonight,” the opener of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” and “Being Alive,” the 11 o’clock number in “Company,” after out-of-town pre-Broadway productions had begun.)“Steve going on Colbert and saying ‘we’re going to do a show’ and then being around for rehearsals and previews and developing and rewriting as always is one thing,” said David Benedict, a writer who is also at work on a Sondheim biography. “It’s a very different proposition when the composer-lyricist isn’t with you.”The show has a sizable budget for an Off Broadway production — the commercial producers who are financing the show (Tom Kirdahy, Sue Wagner, John Johnson and The Stephen Sondheim Trust) expect to raise between $7 million and $8 million, according to a spokesman for the production. The ticket prices are also steep for Off Broadway: Prime seats are being priced at $349.Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, said he had been thrilled when the Sondheim estate approached him last year about staging the musical.“We’re here to support artists who advance their fields,” he said. “I was literally doing back somersaults — for the most important and groundbreaking theater composer and lyricist to have his final work at the Shed is wonderful for us.” More

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      The Shed Hires Boston Ballet’s Meredith Hodges as New C.E.O.

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      As the new arts space faces financial challenges, it tapped Meredith Hodges to take over its administrative leadership from Alex Poots, who will remain as artistic director.After a mixed beginning that was complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, the Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards announced Wednesday that it had tapped Meredith Hodges, known as Max, the executive director of the Boston Ballet, to become its new chief executive officer.“She is the right combination to join the Shed at this moment,” said Jonathan M. Tisch, who in April succeeded the Shed’s founding chairman, Daniel L. Doctoroff, and who — with his wife, Lizzie — donated $27.5 million in 2019 toward the building’s construction. “She is a proven leader who understands the business side of culture, but also has an affinity for the culture side of culture.”The chief executive position was initially held by Alex Poots, who previously founded the Manchester International Festival and served as the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory. But he gave up the chief executive title in January, when the organization said he would solely focus on his role as artistic director.Having opened with great promise in 2019, the Shed saw some of its initial ambitious programming meet with mixed reviews. And it had little time to build momentum or an audience before it was hit, like so many other cultural institutions, by the pandemic: 28 of its 107 full-time workers were laid off in July 2020, and its annual operating budget was reduced to $26.5 million from $46 million.In a telephone interview, Hodges, who will start later this year, said she felt confident about the institution’s prospects. “The Shed opened on the eve of one of the worst crises the art world has ever had to weather,” she said. “There is a huge amount to be proud of in the Shed’s short existence.”The Shed’s founding chairman, Doctoroff, who had been a deputy mayor under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, stepped back from the role because of illness.As mayor, Bloomberg helped jump-start the project by securing a $75 million city grant for the Shed, and he has personally donated $130 million of his own fortune toward the architecturally ambitious $475 million arts center.“Obviously it’s a very difficult moment for all cultural institutions,” Tisch said. “The Shed is no different.”Despite its economic challenges, the Shed has had some noteworthy successes, namely sold-out performances for “Straight Line Crazy,” the recent play about Robert Moses featuring Ralph Fiennes, and an ambitious three-part exhibition by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.Poots will report to Hodges, who said she felt “lucky and excited” to work with him and “to get to free Alex to put all his energy and attention on his passion.”Poots said that he looked forward to working with her. “Having her expertise will enable me to entirely focus on our artistic direction,” he said in a statement, “to produce and present ambitious new productions, and to develop new artistic formats.”Hodges described herself as “strategic” and “data driven.” Asked whether she had any targets for building the Shed’s audience, revenue or the endowment, Hodges said: “I’m a quantitative person, so I’m sure that will come.”Hodges, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, was also a senior associate consultant with Bain & Company.At the Boston Ballet, which she has led since 2014, Hodges more than doubled the endowment, to $36 million from $14 million; helped lead the organization’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; and built attendance to 170,000 for the company’s 2022-23 season, its second highest ever.Before going to the Boston Ballet, she served as the executive director of Gallim Dance, a contemporary dance company in Brooklyn, and in various roles at the Museum of Modern Art, including project director leading strategic development, membership and technology initiatives. More

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      Review: In ‘Misty,’ a Restless Artist Grapples With a Gentrifying City

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      At the Shed, Arinzé Kene mixes spoken word, music and comedy to tell a story of racial tension and male identity in a changing London.There are many ways to tell a story. Freestyle, direct address and a varied assortment of orange balloons are just a few of the expressive means deployed in “Misty,” which opened on Thursday at the Shed. This multidisciplinary piece, by the British writer and performer Arinzé Kene, uses an array of sights and sounds to toy with the perceptions of the people it presumes are watching.The onstage musicians, Liam Godwin (keys) and Nadine Lee (drums), criticize Kene’s opening rhymes, about a Black man who beats up a drunk passenger on the night bus. Will this be another play about, as Lee says, a “generic angry young Black man”? A story that meets the expectations of a mostly white audience and transforms Black trauma into a commodity? Maybe so, but it’s also a probing and restless self-portrait of the artist.In the show that Kene says he’s writing, he plays a Londoner navigating an increasingly hostile city, likening its rhythms to the inner workings of a living creature. (“Misty” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, where, in 2018, it transferred to the West End.) Accompanied by live beats and with microphone in hand, he delivers spoken verse as the Black man: He leaves the drunk passenger behind, visits a lover and later discovers that his mother has locked him out of their home and he’s being pursued by the police.The poetry-slam vibe of these scenes is regularly interrupted by Kene’s many critics: His older sister (played as a young girl by the child actor Braxton Paul at the performance I saw) hangs him out to dry over email. The play’s American producer (represented by an empty director’s chair and a lit cigarette resting in an ashtray) is voiced, hilariously, in snippets of speeches by President Barack Obama. “I feel like I’m outside myself, second-guessing what is expected of me,” Kene tells him.Kene’s “Misty” excels as an act of self-examination more than it coheres as a piece of narrative theater, our critic writes.Sara KrulwichKene is a versatile artist, who comes across onstage as strikingly honest and vulnerable; “Misty” is as much about the challenges of his creative process as the outcome (a bit of clowning that finds Kene encased in a giant balloon is an apt visual metaphor). The production, from the director Omar Elerian, is beautifully atmospheric, propulsive and often a sensory feat. But “Misty” excels as an act of self-examination more than it coheres as a piece of narrative theater.Audience comprehension may be strained, for example, by the time Kene clarifies that the man on the bus isn’t him, but a friend who inspired the show. It’s around the same time that Kene reverses the play’s central, and ultimately overworked, conceit, insisting that white gentrifiers, rather than Black men, are viruses infecting the city. (The police, however, remain antivirals.) Kene favors repetition, in his lyrics and broader thematic construction, a style that might benefit from a tighter running time (the show is two hours with an intermission).There is a meta irony to bemoaning gentrification from inside this Hudson Yards theater, and to confronting white audiences with what they expect to see there. Even in interrogating the conundrum Kene faces as a Black artist, “Misty” narrowly addresses itself to white perspectives. It’s a trap that settings like this one make even harder to escape.MistyThrough April 2 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      The Shed Plans to Reopen for Covid-Tested Audiences

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMusic for the Virus-Tested: The Shed Plans a Cautious ReopeningRenée Fleming, Michelle Wolf, Kelsey Lu and the New York Philharmonic will perform in April for limited audiences.The Shed will hold performances for limited audiences in which everyone has either been tested for the coronavirus or vaccinated against it.Credit…Jasdeep KangMarch 10, 2021Updated 5:44 p.m. ETThe New York City arts scene is about to pass another milestone on the road to reopening: The Shed, a large performing arts venue in Hudson Yards, said Wednesday that it would hold a series of indoor performances next month for limited audiences in which everyone has either been tested for the coronavirus or vaccinated against it.The Shed said it would present four events next month: concerts by the cellist and vocalist Kelsey Lu, the soprano Renée Fleming and a string ensemble from the New York Philharmonic, and a comedy set by Michelle Wolf.Each of the performances will be open to up to 150 people, all masked, in a space that can seat 1,280. The Shed said it would require patrons to present confirmation of a recent negative coronavirus test, or confirmation of full vaccination; requiring testing allows the Shed admit the largest number of audience members allowed under state protocols.“In these first steps, there’s limited capacity, but you have to start somewhere,” said the Shed’s artistic director, Alex Poots. “Those first steps are really important for us, for our audiences and for our artists — just the idea that we might return to something joyful.”The Shed is the third New York City arts presenter to announce this week specific plans for a resumption of programming, following last week’s announcement by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo that arts and entertainment organizations could begin presenting indoor work for limited-capacity audiences. On Tuesday, the commercial producer Daryl Roth said she would present “Blindness,” an audio adaptation of the José Saramago novel, to audiences of up to 50 at her Union Square theater, and the Park Avenue Armory said it would present a series of music, dance, and movement works, starting with a piece by Bill T. Jones for an audience of 100. The Armory said it would require ticket buyers to take an on-site rapid coronavirus test, for free, before entering.Poots said the Shed would start with music and comedy because “both have universal appeal, and they also align well with the guidelines that have emerged.”“It gets far more complex when you get into more intricate art forms that require a lot of costume changes or close-up rehearsal,” he said. The productions are small, but not tiny; Lu will be accompanied by 14 musicians, and the Philharmonic ensemble will include 20 players. None of the performances will have intermissions.The first performer, Lu, is planning to present an opera called “This is a Test.”“I have been waiting for this day — it’s been too long,” Lu said. “There’s nothing like that exchange between audience and performer. It’s left a void for me and so many of us.”The Shed, like many arts institutions, canceled programs starting March 12 of last year. Since then, it has presented a visual art exhibition, of work by Howardena Pindell; a filmed rendition of a play, “November” by Claudia Rankine, and an online digital works series. But these April events will be the first live performances with paying audiences. The Shed has some considerable architectural advantages under the circumstances — it is a new building with a state-of-the-art HVAC system capable of fully refreshing the breathable indoor air every 30 minutes, and its 18,000-square-foot main performance space opens directly to the outside.The Shed is planning to follow the April performances by, in May, hosting the Frieze New York art fair for the first time, and in June, hosting Open Call, a program for early career artists, as well as programs in collaboration with the Tribeca Film Festival. Poots said that he hopes that by fall, “things will be getting a lot easier, in terms of capacities and regulations.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More