[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to the score from the final musical composed by the late Stephen Sondheim, and you can now hear it in a show at The Shed titled Here We Are. It was a project Sondheim worked on for many years, right up until the final days of his life. It is an unusual musical based on two different films by the Spanish surrealist director Luis Bunuel. The project was a true collaboration between Sondheim, book writer David Ives, and director Joe Montello. With a cast that's a theater's who's who, two of whom are with me today in studio.

In the first act, we meet a group of bougie New Yorkers looking for, wait for it, a brunch spot. There is an agro-talent agent and her less-than-honest plastic surgeon husband, a horny Mediterranean ambassador, a crass businessman, and his bubbly, slightly dim wife. Also being dragged along is Fritz, the wife's sister, a young activist who supports the revolution, but has a trust fund. She's played by Parade star Michaela Diamond, but no matter where this group goes, they seem unable to find actual food. Their various servers, played mostly by Denis O'Hare, either can't or won't serve them anything edible.

Looking for a solution, the group heads to the ambassador's embassy residence where they finally eat, but in Act 2, the group realizes the revolution might have arrived, and they can't leave this room that they've entered. All this makes for a surreal, funny, absurdist takedown of those who have everything, but are never satisfied in the conditions they've created in the world.

Here We Are is running at The Shed through January 21st, and joining us now are my Micaela Diamond who plays Secret Revolutionary Fritz. Hi Micaela.

Micaela Diamond: Hi, thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Denis O'Hare who plays so many different characters, with so many different accents, with so many different wigs.

Denis O'Hare: I'll use my real accent today.

Alison Stewart: Welcome to the studio.

Denis O'Hare: I'm happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: Denis, you're a Sondheim vet, you were nominated for Attorney for Assassins, what a good show. You starred in a production of Adventure of the Woods. What is classic about this Sondheim show?

Denis O'Hare: Gosh, oddly enough, I think, I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say it's not classic because I think Sondheim is always reinventing himself, and I think kind of his genius was the fact that he was brave enough to explore new genres. Think about how far away this is from something like Company, or how far away Into the Woods is from Little Night Music.

Little Night Music is based on Ingmar Bergman film, is kind of hyper-realist, 19th century, and very lyrical, almost opera. Then Into the Woods is a fairy tale. It's an absolute fairy tale romp. Then you have something super quotidien, like Company or Merlin Rollong, about the intricacies of sophisticated people, and their lives, and their relationships. Once again, I feel like he's gone to new territory to explore Bunuel. Spanish Surrealism? Really?

Alison Stewart: Yes, really. It happened. Micaela, at the beginning of your career, correct me if I'm wrong, you did go to LaGuardia High School of Art?

Micaela Diamond: I did.

Alison Stewart: I have to imagine you studied Sondheim in your career, in your education. What does it mean to you to be cast in this show?

Micaela Diamond: Oh, it's everything. One of the first shows I did was Sweeney Todd at a community theater called Kids Theater in New York, and I was ensemble number 11. I just crawled under the chair we had, and was trying to be so creepy for so long. I love his work. I get chills every night at some point in the show, listening to some melody that I didn't hear in the trombone, or something. It's just so weird. You grow up, and his music hits you in different ways. I think that's the kind of magic of him.

Alison Stewart: The show is unconventional in the sense that you are on stage long before anything happens. We're all getting in our seats and we're chatting, and there you are on stage, Denis, cleaning these giant mirrors. It's like a black box theater, it's white. It's all white on all sides. What conversations do you have with your director about why it was important for you as the person-

Denis O'Hare: Tracy Bennett my partner in crime.

Alison Stewart: - to be on stage before everything starts, and just cleaning, cleaning, cleaning?

Denis O'Hare: That that was Joe. Joe claims that I was inspiration for that. I don't remember that, but it was a conversation we had about what the life is of these people. I love that kind of gimmick. It's not even a gimmick. I love that setup because I like playing with theatrical inventions. I like the fact that the play doesn't necessarily begin in a disciplined way, curtain up, let's go. Overture, let's go. It sets the audience, I feel like, in a tone that is-- well, on the one hand, it's wrong-footing them. It's saying, we don't know what's happening.

In fact, the woman behind My Husband, opening night, said, "I don't understand why they're doing this now. Why are they doing this now?" But the great thing about that comment is that what she's saying is, why do we have to look at this? That's a great theme of the play. Why do we have to look at the ugly things in life? Why do we have to have servers who have real lives? Why do we have to have people who work for us who have feelings? Why do we have to have people who work for us fall and trip, and hurt themselves on the way to delivering my perfect omelet?

That cruelty, which is implicit in, I Don't Want To Look at That is the exact reason why we're doing it. I think it's deeply subversive. If you watch us doing it, it's pretty boring. Joe said, please don't be interesting. He kept saying it. Tracy Bennett cannot help but be interesting. Everything she does is interesting, so she's interesting. I'm not. Joe kept saying, "Don't be interesting. Don't interact. Don't look at it." He said, "Just clean." If you watch us, you're not going to be deeply rewarded, but if you turn away, you're turning away. You're choosing to ignore a whole subset of worker culture in this community, in this world, that is taken for granted, that is always ignored. It sets the play up at the beginning, you're going to ignore these people at your peril, because in Act 2--

Alison Stewart: It's interesting in Act 2, it's very interesting a show because it looks completely different in Act 2. In Act 1, it is stark and then there's this dramatic difference in Act 2, when it's just so ornate and gold, and just a little bit too much of everything. Then there's a giant bear that shows up on stage, and maybe he's real, maybe he's not, but nobody thinks he's a bear. He's there.

My question is for you, Micaela. You just came from Parade, which is a very straightforward plotline based on a real history, a very serious history, a very serious story. How did you get your arms and your head around working with such a surreal script, and such a surreal show?

Micaela Diamond: Anytime somebody asks me this, I'm always very quick to be like, I had a lot of help. We spent five weeks in a rehearsal room trying to figure this out all together, and really figure out what the language of this piece is. We had this superstar cast who were all the same amount of confused, which was kind of thrilling because you learn it together. I'm this young person in a room with all these greats, and it's a great reminder that we all have to start somewhere.

I just adored the process, and I think it was hard for me. I closed Parade on a Sunday night, and we were in rehearsal on a Monday.

Denis O'Hare: That's crazy.

Micaela Diamond: I was like, what is this play, and who am I, and what can I even bring to this character? It was kind of grueling for me. It was rewarding as well, because we finally came to this place of understanding, or as we say, like the lack of understanding and being okay with that, of the lack of explanation for all this. It's something Louis Bunuel said in his autobiography, he would take out a shot in his movie if it could be explained. I think that was so great as an actor, as a person to lean into the unexplainable nature of the world, of our life, of our subconscious, of our dream reality. I think it's so fun to work in that way, and coming off of Parade, what a gift to just really sharp turn it.

Alison Stewart: I wonder if not having time actually worked out to be to the benefit because you had to go to your lizard brain. You couldn't stop, and think about it too much, and overthink it.

Micaela Diamond: Totally.

Denis O'Hare: Also, and the writing process was pretty extensive. Act 2 changed radically throughout, not only rehearsals, but previews. It didn't affect me as much, but you guys were given massive rewrites, whole new scenes, 11-page scene at one point, the confession scene or whatever it was, and that 11-page. Secrets, and then the monologues were added at the end, very, very late in the process. They got new material. You're right, lizard brain, memorize, play it. Don't figure out why you're playing it, just play it. Then you realize as you play it why you're doing it, and it sinks in.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Micaela Diamond, and Denis O'Hare, we're talking about Here We Are, running at The Shed through January 21st.

Fritz, she really acts like she hates hanging out with these people, and her sister, Maryanne, she's so over them and they're so bougie and ugh. Why does she keep hanging out with them? Why does she go to brunch?

Micaela Diamond: That was my question first day of rehearsal too, Alison. I think that it's a kind of nuanced answer in some ways, but I will say, I know so many people who you know have these kind of nepo baby lives or have a lot of money in their trust funds, but live in a studio apartment in Brooklyn with two roommates because they want to feel like they're part of this this kind of generation of revolutionists.

Denis O'Hare: I love that.

Micaela Diamond: I think that is a great, interesting character to play. What is going on inside of her head to the point that she's gay, and then all of a sudden falls in love with this very hetero soldier?

Denis O'Hare: Whose name she doesn't know.

Alison Stewart: Whose name I still don't know by the end of the play. I think that that part of it is she loves her family. I think she deeply wants to be her sister in many, many ways. Marianne represents all the things that somehow she has rebelled against, but secretly wants, as we do, as people. I think also there's just this very common denominator of it's fun to have everything. We think that that will somehow bring us the most happiness.

Then I think we find out in Act 2, that some of the freedom of questions that they were able to ask in Act 1, actually don't mean anything. I think she's left to really sit with that question, and sit with herself, and her hypocrisy of really wanting to have bougie dinners, and be a consumer of the world, and also hate it deeply. Alison Stewart: Denis, you play a succession, in the beginning of the show, of servers. One's at a place called Cafe Everything, which has got one of those huge Bible of a menu.

Denis O'Hare: Menu, massive.

Alison Stewart: Another one is a fancy Italian restaurant, where all the food turns out to be wax and inedible. We'll talk about the Butler in a second. All your characters have a certain exasperation about them. Yet they're very different at different places in life. Are you thinking about them on a continuum, or are they each individual characters the way you're playing them?

Denis O'Hare: To me, they're individual characters. I don't bring anything along with each one of them, but they themselves form a palate of sorts. They form a layer of an archetype, and they add up. As the audience watches, they add up. In between Micy is Tracy, and Tracy is also playing a variety of servers, and at one point she plays a French waitress who has had enough, and sings this incredibly funny French song about it is what it is.

The trick of this play has always been not to be too linear, and not to try to add things up on my side. It's for the audience to add it up. I had really good teachers growing up. My acting teacher was really fantastic. A guy named David Downton Northwestern. He would always say the actor has to be aware of the play and the structure of the play, and their part in it, but the character can't be. The character can't know what the actor knows.

As the actor, you have to be aware of how you're slotting in, what function you play, but the character only knows one thing, that right now he's dealing with a bunch of six demanding people, and he has no food to give them. He's going to go and end things. That's all I'll say.

Alison Stewart: We have a little bit of the song where he's explaining how he doesn't have anything.

Micaela Diamond: Oh, good.

Alison Stewart: This is a bit of Here We Are. This is Denis O'Hare and Company.

[music]

There's such great lyrics. Do you have one particular that you really like in that song? They're just --

Denis O'Hare: I love the little section of not only do we have no, no, Earl Gray. No, no Earl Gray, no Earl Green, no Earl Red or Blue, or anything in between. It's just a beautiful musical section, and it's a beautiful lyrical section, I think. The lyrics in this are so intelligent. They're so snappy, they're so smart. That's been my challenge both from Joe, our director, and our assistant director Trey, remind me, let the lyrics do the work. Stop, don't push, don't push. That's hard for me. I'm a broke actor.

Micaela Diamond: He makes choices.

Denis O'Hare: I make choices.

Alison Stewart: Just a practical question. All the wigs. All the wigs you wear. Many, many wigs. What don't we see off-stage?

Denis O'Hare: It's a madhouse.

Alison Stewart: Tell us of your secrets.

Denis O'Hare: It's channel house. It's a madhouse. My son came, he came and saw the show once, and then I had him come backstage. He's 12. I said, "Declan, come on. You got to watch me do the quick changes." The quick changes are timed. We had to rehearse them. Tracy's got some crazy ones. My first quick change is pretty easy, but we still do it at a clip, and it's about getting the clothes off, at the same time, the wigs coming off, getting clothes back on, changing shoes, pulling off an extra pair of socks to reveal different socks. Getting the wig on, getting the wig pins in, getting the shirt snapped, drinking water, and going.

The tight one is between the Italian waiter, and the English butler because not only is it a wig and an entire set of clothes, everything including shoes, it's also the mustaches that I have on has to be wiped off. Jamie, who's my amazing wig person, she takes care of it all, and Russell's my dresser, and we have it choreographed. It is choreographed down to the movement.

Micaela Diamond: You have to tell them that your mustache is different every single day, and-

Denis O'Hare: My mustache is different.

Micaela Diamond: - we all die on stage.

Alison Stewart: Oh, so you don't know?

Micaela Diamond: No. He comes on, and it's so funny.

Denis O'Hare: There's a mustache menu backstage, which people have added to gin. Gin Ha has added quite a few mustaches, and we draw them up on the board. There are probably about 100 now?

Micaela Diamond: Yes.

Denis O'Hare: Then we just go down a column, and I'll just go, "Where are we at? Okay. We're there." My latest edition was one to Cantinflas, it accredited to Cantinflas who was a great Mexican actor. I love his mustache, so that's there. We have a John Waters mustache. We have a Pepé Le Pew mustache. We have his words, we had the word Here Now. We have Cafe Everything. The mustaches are a riot. They're a riot.

Alison Stewart: When do you decide, or do you have a mustache mood?

Denis O'Hare: I let people decide. I sometimes ask people in the room to come pick a mustache, or we just go down the list of mustaches.

Micaela Diamond: Look, we've got to keep it interesting somehow.

Denis O'Hare: We totally. I try to make you guys laugh, but I definitely want to keep it lively.

Micaela Diamond: I've had to hide my face in the menu a few times.

Alison Stewart: They do not teach you about that at Northwestern, the mustache.

Denis O'Hare: No.

Alison Stewart: On the job training. You had mentioned Bunuel's memoir. Is that something that you read in preparation or?

Micaela Diamond: I did. I read it when we were rehearsing. I just thought it would be, I don't know. I always like-- it's part of what I love about theater, is you get to immerse yourself in a new time period, a new decade. Like Parade too, I really loved the contextualizing-

Denis O'Hare: I like that word too.

Micaela Diamond: - of the time period you're going to be in for the next six months. I really enjoyed learning about Bunuel, and the surrealist art. He really started this new period of really equalizing your conscious and your subconscious, and what that does if we treated our subconscious with the same amount of respect as we did to our conscious mind. I loved reading that. I have some books on my little dressing room station that remind me of the piece. When in doubt, if I'm feeling tired or something, or with lack of inspiration, I'll just pick up a book and finger a page.

Alison Stewart: Were you familiar? Have you--?

Denis O'Hare: I read it too. Bunch of us read it. I read it as slowly as possible because it actually made me so happy. He's a deeply weird guy. He hung around with Dali and Lorca, and had this gang of Spanish creatives, and they had these weird--

Alison Stewart: Can you imagine that?

Denis O'Hare: Can you imagine that group? Dali, and he elaborated, An Andalou, that famous movie with the eyeball being slit.

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes.

Denis O'Hare: That was Dali and Bunuel. The movies are all truly disturbing, and none of them make you feel really good.

Alison Stewart: I said to a friend, like, "There are no eyeballs in this. Are they there?"

Denis O'Hare: No, and no sheep either. There are a sheep in the other one, but reading autobiography is joyous. He was really a joyous person in many ways. He just worked, worked, worked, worked and made tons of films and collaborated, and was poor, and had money, and then lost money. My favorite little story was he was in LA and Hollywood, they brought him over, and he was invited to Charlie Chaplin's house for a Christmas dinner. Bunuel and his friend were like, "Hey, let's go in the other room and destroy the Christmas tree." "Why?" "Because it's bourgeois," and they did. They went in, and they tore it to pieces. Chaplain was like, "What are you doing?" That's who these people were.

Micaela Diamond: They were revolutionists that far.

Denis O'Hare: They wouldn't be fun at a dinner party, but they're fun to read about.

Alison Stewart: That's right.

Micaela Diamond: I wouldn't have wanted to live at the same time as them.

Denis O'Hare: No.

Micaela Diamond: But I like reading about it.

Denis O'Hare: Apparently, as a director, he was incredibly easy to work with because he let the actors do what they wanted to. You think about Katherine Denu being his muse. What an interesting marriage. This very classical-looking woman who is playing around in this crazy playground with this guy.

Alison Stewart: There's amazing supercuts of some of his iconic shots together. You just watch them, and it's like a museum piece to watch all of his-- and the way he thought about the world. Like you said, I'm not sure I want to hang around it all the time, but it's very interesting, is it?

Micaela Diamond and Dennis O'Hare are my guests. We're talking about Here We Are running at The Shed through January 21st. We're not giving anything away. It's been in all the reviews. The second half of the show, everyone is locked in this room. Does Fritz think the revolution has happened, and that she's stuck in the room with all these bougie people?

Micaela Diamond: I hesitate to answer any questions from people like this. I will tell you my opinion, but I don't think it's the right one.

Alison Stewart: Tell me your opinion.

Micaela Diamond: I do think she thinks that the revolution is happening. I'll say one line that I love that really emotionally affects me every night, which I didn't quite expect it to, which are always the moments. The ones that took you by surprise. It's when I say after we get out, is I say, "Now the world is all before her." I think that idea that there's something so comforting about being stuck, and not having to make choice about your identity, or about your relationships, was freeing to her.

I wonder if people connect that in some way to the pandemic. I think there was a sense of safety, of freedom, of having the world stopped for a moment.

Dennis O'Hare: Here's a great line about being grounded in your bedroom.

Micaela Diamond: Yes, exactly. I think that those questions are hard to say out loud, but I think that some people really felt safe during that time, and I think Fritz was one of those people.

Dennis O'Hare: The identity thing is interesting because I love playing all my characters. The last character, I don't know if we can talk about him. I guess, we can.

Alison Stewart: A little bit.

Dennis O'Hare: Inferno, he's the hardest to play because he's both deeply angry, and to my estimation, deeply tragic because he founds his entire life on one idea, the idea of revolution. When the revolution happens, he's not part of it. He's trapped in the room too. He's trying to enact his version of revolution in that room, and he fails. He disappears from the play at the end, which is, I think it's chilling. I know what happens to him, I'm not going to say what happens to him, but it's tragic.

In his trajectory in the second act, it's actually tragic. He's somebody who thinks he has power, and he has absolutely no power. The people in the room demonstrate to him over and over and over again how powerless he is, and it's humiliating, and it's revealing.

Leo never loses his power. He lays on a couch like a king. He gets covered with tapestry. He never loses his power. He can't even be killed. He can't be killed. It's a devastating critique, the act too.

Alison Stewart: At one point in the show, all the lights come up. I'm assuming you can see all of us. What do you see or do? Are you looking for anything?

Micaela Diamond: Some people wave, and wanna be a part of it.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Micaela Diamond: Then there are other people who hide. Then there are the ones in the middle who enjoy watching the other audience members, and seeing what they're doing. I actually love that moment.

Dennis O'Hare: It's a great moment.

Micaela Diamond: Because we get to be these little voyeurs to whatever the heck they're feeling, but I love it.

Dennis O'Hare: I'm on the side. I talked Joe into making me a part of it because I was in rehearsal watching that scene. Where I was in rehearsal, I was on my phone one day, and then suddenly the lights went up. I went, "Oh my God, I wonder if I'm implied in this. Am I in this?" I said to Joe, "Am I waiting to make an entrance maybe, and maybe I get caught?" He goes, "Yes, try it. Try it. Try it." We tried it. It's only for one part of the audience-

Micaela Diamond: And they love it.

Dennis O'Hare: - and they love it. What happens, the lights come up, and I take a moment to go, "What's happening? Oh my God. I'm being looked at. I'm not supposed to be here," and I run away.

Micaela Diamond: It's fantastic.

Dennis O'Hare: I usually get hurt.

Alison Stewart: Oh no.

Dennis O'Hare: I keep running into the wall-

Micaela Diamond: I do that too.

Dennis O'Hare: - and I jam my finger. Anything for the moment. Anything for a laugh.

Alison Stewart: The night I was there, I think a chair went off the stage.

Micaela Diamond: Oh yes. Sure.

Dennis O'Hare: Oh yes, the chair off stage.

Micaela Diamond: What's lovely is there's so many things that go wrong in our show, and all of it can work because we break the rules all the time of our own structure and form. Of course, that chair fell off, and we all were like, "What's going to happen?" Then of course, Dennis O'Hare went and got it.

Alison Stewart: He's mad about like, "I got to go get this chair now too."

Dennis O'Hare: Remember there was one night a glass broke on stage, and we have glass and water, and Jean took it upon himself to clean it up, and then somebody else helped him, and then somebody put a blanket down on top of it.

Micaela Diamond: It's thrilling.

Dennis O'Hare: The entire cast is quietly, while the play is going on went, "How am I going to fix that glass? I got to get that." Then one night Jeremy lost the cell phone. It went off the stage. He went flying off the stage, and Amber has to have it. Within about five minutes, four cell phones came her way on stage. Passed by various actors. Bobby gave me one. He was like, "Give this to Amber." I gave it to Tracy. I said, "Give this to Amber." We're all trying to figure out how to get the cell phone to Amber because she has to have a phone in her head.

Alison Stewart: Can we shout out to everybody in the cast?

Dennis O'Hare: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to let you guys do it.

Dennis O'Hare: Oh, sure.

Dennis O'Hare: Amber Gray.

Micaela Diamond: Jeremy Seamus.

Dennis O'Hare: Bobby Cannavale.

Micaela Diamond: Steve Pasquale.

Dennis O'Hare: Yun-jin Huh.

Micaela Diamond: Dennis O'Hare.

Dennis O'Hare: Francois Batista.

Micaela Diamond: Tracy Bennett.

Dennis O'Hare: Rachel Bay Jones.

Alison Stewart: There we go.

Dennis O'Hare: David High Pierce.

Micaela Diamond: David High Pierce. How did we forgot the most influential-

Dennis O'Hare: The most, most, most delightful amazing person.

Micaela Diamond: - nicest, perfectest person ever in the world.

Alison Stewart: What do you hope people have a conversation about after this show when the go for drinks, or for coffee?

Dennis O'Hare: It's funny. David and I, we had collected money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. That's when you get a lot of reactions. We also sign autographs afterward, and people often talk. There's a lovely British couple there who in all honesty, looked at both David and I, and were wide-eyed. They went, "What does it mean?" We were both like, "Uh--"

Micaela Diamond: We don't know.

Dennis O'Hare: They were like, "No, really, what does it mean?" We were like-- I was with David Ives that night in the bar downstairs, and they got him. When I left, they were cornering him. I think they were like, "You have to tell us. We cannot leave here until we know what it means."

Micaela Diamond: I love that. I want people to lay in their bed at night being like, "What do you think that was?" Because I change my mind about it every day.

Dennis O'Hare: Totally.

Micaela Diamond: We do the roads, and sometimes those stop and starts people are very confused by, "Why do you stop? Why do you stop in the roads, and then reset?" I used to think it was something different, now I think it's our subconscious. Sometimes I think it's like we made a wrong turn, and we have to go back. Then it's the quiet moments in the car. There's just a million things it can be even.

Dennis O'Hare: Even the bear, I go back and forth, and I think, the bear's real. The bear's absolutely real. The bear is not a dream. That happened.

Micaela Diamond: Totally. Who knows?

Alison Stewart: The bear could be real.

Dennis O'Hare: The bear could be real. One thing that I think people should take away from it is a great appreciation of the bravery of Stephen Sondheim and David Ives and Joe Mantello and the producers, who have decided to put on this piece that is finished. It's done. Every piece is a collaboration. This was a collaboration that was being worked on with David and Sondheim and Joe for years. Knowing his intentions, knowing what music he had, it's done.

In our own personal work, the idea of, be brave, risk it, do it for the right reasons, which is not to be a hit, not to transfer, not to make money, but because it's a beautiful thing that needs to be in the world.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is Here We Are. It's at The Shed through January 21st. I've been speaking with Dennis O'Hare and Micaela Diamond. Thank you so much for coming to the studio.

Micaela Diamond: Thanks for having us.

Dennis O'Hare: Thank you. We love the-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.