Yes, the title of this thread sounds like that of a university thesis, but the thought occurred to me that HERE WE ARE might be tapping into a theme of Sondheim's work more broadly.
For example, in A Little Night Music, the main characters move into a different world in Act Two, outside their regulated lives, and that world - of the Armfeldt estate - provides them with the unexpected opportunity to see themselves anew. In the case of Frederick, it is only through facing death that he is brought back to "life". And, in the original production, of course, the estate was also "woods" (A tree-scape). (A nod, not only to Magritte, but also Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, in which characters go into the forest and become renewed.)
In Into The Woods itself, the second act is also a disrupted world. And it follows a quest. Again, confronting death awakens liberation.
In Sunday in the Park with George, the second act is, after a period at its start devoted to the stasis of the painting, a world of artistic stagnation, in which liberation comes from the arrival of a "ghost", so to speak, from beyond that world. Again, George faces death ("George too may fade/ leaving no mark..."), and is, unexpectedly, revivified.
Follies, too, has an echo of this idea: the party is a world that disrupts the mundane life of the characters, and they pass through this netherworld back towards the light.
I think that in each of these projects, Sondheim was part of the initiative unlike, say, Company or Pacific Overtures, which were brought to him.
Thoughts? |
