Article highlights:
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.
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 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.
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."
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."
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.
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."
"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.
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."
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.