Posted: 1/12/24 at 8:01pm
StylishCynic said: "bear88 said: "Given the surreal nature of the source material, it is perhaps a fool's errand to ask too many questions about plot and character developments inHere We Are, and some things seem left to the audience's imagination or are open to interpretation. I couldn't figure out a way to address these queries without spoiling the plot. So here goes (under spoiler tags):
-- What happens to the main characters at the end?
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My thoughts:
-- I'm fairly sure that at the end, I heard Marianne say that she "just didn't [tell anyone what it was she was supposed to do]". This could easily be misunderstood as "just did it." We need the published script to confirm.
--If she did indeed say that she "did it," then it's my understanding that whatever it was... when it happened, it wasn't shown. The sequences In The Room cut around the amount of time. It either happened in between scenes that we are shown, or it happened when they were freed and everyone's phone began working again.
-- What happens to the main characters at the end?
--I thought that the Revolution found them? In other words, we see that our protagonists escaped one pickle only to fall into another.
-- re: Character changes
--There's not too much to read into here. It's clear that the HWA protagonists are only loosely inspired by the Buñuel characters and this creative team impressed their own personalities onto the archetypes. An example is how the two lovers commit suicide in the closet in the film. Sondheim / Ives make an excellent joke of this and instead found more value to the show in preserving all of their characters.
--We also know from the @SondheimLetters instagram that in one iteration (maybe circa 2017) of the show, they removed the "Priest / Gardener" entirely because they found that "he was the unnecessary member of the group." This decision was evidently reversed.
As one of your points isn’t much of a spoiler, I am interested in the fact that David Hyde Pierce’s character was originally cut from the show as ‘the unnecessary member of the group.’ (I ran across Sondheim’s 2017 letter in the SondheimLetters Instagram page, as you noted.) This raises the question of when the bishop was restored. Obviously, Sondheim had written a song for him - but it’s not terribly surprising that he and Ives would have decided to drop him (and his song) when they just had a first act. His abrupt arrival near the very end of the first act, while true to the film, feels even more random than the other events.
But David Hyde Pierce plays a small but pivotal role in the second act, and I am curious about whether the decision to restore the bishop was made long before Sondheim died, or after the last reading, or possibly after Sondheim’s death when David Ives and Joe Mantello were making revisions. My suspicion is that he was back in the show by the time of the 2021 reading, but it’s just one of the show’s many mysteries.
The bishop’s restoration does change the tone of the show in ways that worked for me. And David Hyde Pierce was wonderful, especially in his scenes with Rachel Bay Jones.
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