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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Nick Curtis

Here We Are at the National Theatre, Lyttelton review: should this have been staged at all?

the National Theatre National Theatre Stephen Sondheim Jane Krakowski Marc Brenner Rory Kinnear Denis OHare Joe Mantello Harry HaddenPaton Jesse Tyler Ferguson
The cast of Here We Are at the National Theatre - (Marc Brenner)

This posthumously realised work by the peerless American composer, lyricist and innovator Stephen Sondheim is a musical with no songs and, in the second half, hardly any music.

Cannibalised from two films by Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and Exterminating Angel (1962), the show starts out playfully satirical and ends in grindingly repetitive, adolescent expressions of existential fear and societal collapse.

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