THE BRUNCH BUNCH

Stephen Sondheim’ last musical, Here We Are,” at the Shed.

- HELEN SHAW

In September, 2021, two months before Stephen Sondheim died, at the age of ninety-one, he attended a read-through of his then incomplete final musical. Based on two lacerating, Surrealist Luis Buñuel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel,” it had, at various times in its decade of development, been called “Buñuel” and a title that Sondheim announced in a television interview—“Square One,” a reference to the work’s preoccupation with recursion and stasis.

Sondheim, a dizzyingly complex lyricist with an unparalleled ear for syncopation and sour-sweet harmonies, could seemingly turn anything into a musical: a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play (“Merrily We Roll Along”), a Victorian penny dreadful (“Sweeney Todd”), a Post-Impressionist painting (“Sunday in the Park with George”). According to David Ives, a comic playwright best known for the claustrophobic “Venus in Fur,” and the director Joe Mantello, who won a Tony for his direction of the 2004 production of Sondheim’s “Assassins,” the composer was still creatively sharp yet somehow unable to make progress on the Buñuel show’s second act. Buoyed by the reading, Ives and Mantello apparently convinced Sondheim that they could complete it by using what he had already written and leaving the second half mostly without songs. The situation itself is surreal: the legendary Sondheim, like Penelope in the Odyssey, weaving and unravelling, promising and procrastinating—and then, after all delaying tactics fail, watching as the tapestry is cut from the loom.