How Complete Was Stephen Sondheim’s Final Musical?

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.”

“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 senses 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.”

There 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.”