The Last Midnight

A dark, fragmented, and compelling final message from the master.

- SARA HOLDREN

UNLIKE AN ORWELL or an Odets, the cheekily (and correctly) self-described "icon of the American musical theater" Stephen Sondheim is not ordinarily associated with overt political righteousness. Yet what Orwell called "a sense of injustice" flows through Sondheim's work-sometimes as a quiet underground stream, sometimes as a heaving, filthy flood. "What does a man do, when at last he realizes his suffering is caused not by the cruelty of fate but by the injustice of his fellow human beings?" asks the anarchist Emma Goldman in Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins. So although it's not a surprise, it's still an invigorating relief that Sondheim's final offering to the world, the long-time-coming new musical Here We Are, is fittingly complex and thorny. The same seething consciousness of caste and cruelty that ripples through Assassins and Sweeney Todd forms the backbone of Here We Are, a show with, if anything, even more of an impulse to eat the rich. There's no blurring of the composer-lyricist's inimitable agile and angular forms, no blunting of his wit, no comfort in nostalgia. The play has sharp, savage urges. When it wobbles, and it does so increasingly as it goes along, it's because the logical conclusion of its premise is so dark, so extreme, that you can feel the more ambivalent instinct of the show's creators to look for alternative exits.