Here We Are, National Theatre review - Sondheim's sensational swan song

You don't have to be greeting the modern day with a smile unsupported by events in the wider world to have a field day at Here We Are. The last musical from the venerated Stephen Sondheim has only grown in import and meaning since I caught its New York premiere some 18 months ago.

Blessed with two alums from that production, the indispensible duo of Denis O'Hare and Tracie Bennett, this musical adaptation of two surrealists works from Luis Buñuel manages, miraculously, to remain light on its feet even as the landscape lowers around it. Musical theatre newbies may want more distinct numbers, not knowing that late-career Sondheim (Passion, anyone?) some while ago dispensed with those. But those willing to meet the show on its own wacky, wonderful terms are in for a treat, and not just because the National has fielded a lineup of talent that is extraordinary, even at that address. You might not expect the Spanish-Mexican master filmmaker of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel to provide musical fodder, but then again, one might have said the same of Ingmar Bergman and Ettore Scola, before A Little Night Music and Passion came along. In fact, this conjoining of two highly distinct titles results in a seamless thematic weave, thanks to the nimble work of book writer David Ives and the surpassingly empathic work of the director, Joe Mantello, both of whom have met head on the task, to co-opt an earlier Sondheim lyric, of metaphorically finishing the hat - that's to say, providing shape and definition to material whose music, at least, was left incomplete at the time of Sondheim's death. (In more than one interview I had with the composer during his final years, he spoke candidly of the difficulty of continuing as a creator.) 

In fact, the absence of melody lends both poignance and power to a second act that entraps its privileged characters in a resplendently dark-hued residence whose inhabitants are reduced to eating paper and where water, as throughout this musical, is in short supply. Harry Hadden-Patton's shoe fetishist bishop is given to quoting TS Eliot, and Martha Plimpton's definitively dry film exec says of the zeitgeisty image of starving children in China that it's one thing to be thinking about them and something altogether else to be them. 

The first act unfolds in a gleaming white set that could be a modish art gallery (there's a suitable painting on view to match) and that finds the characters embarked on nothing more or less basic than finding a place to eat. That turns out not to be as easy as you might think: the Cafe Everything, promising abalone omelettes with saffron if you please, turns out not be offering much of anything. The French deconstructivist fare promised elsewhere merely prompts the protean Tracie Bennett, playing (as does O'Hare) a range of waiters here referred to as "enablers", to ponder aloud what difference it makes how a pigeon is prepared.

Weaving her gossamer way through it all is Jane Krakowski's blissful Marianne (pictured above) who is first seen holding flowers that she will later eat and whose apparent sunniness in the face of disaster marks her out as a fluttery, negligee-wearing equivalent to Beckett's Winnie from Happy Days: indeed, more than once, Here We Are feels like its own existentialist extension not just to Beckett but to Sartre, whose No Exit could be the subtitle of the deprived entourage of the second act who experience even the taking away of music: "the piano died," remarks the Bishop, and Hadden-Paton's "RIP" that follows induces an inevitable, and respectful, hush. 

Given to exhalations of "poof" that are themselves worth the price of admission, Marianne is doing battle with a wayward memory. But she knows enough to realise that she is sick of her boorish husband Leo, a moneyman whom Rory Kinnear, very much cast against type for an actor of such civility, plays with a devil-may-care disregard for such things as courtesy and generosity. Small wonder he is revealed to have a less-than-lovely past.

Others on view include Modern Family's Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a plastic surgeon who isn't quite as thrilled at having done 1000 nose jobs as he might seem at the start (interestingly, he and Denis O'Hare won Tony Awards in New York for the same part in the same play, albeit 19 years apart) and Chumisa Dornford-May (pictured below) in sensational voice as Fritz, the angry, renegade spirit of the next generation. This is a show whose characters are as likely as not to boast abstractions for names - Inferno, for instance, or Apocalypse. 

The proto-revolutionary Fritz announces she has been gay since the age of three, only to then fall into the arms of the hunky soldier deliciously played by Richard Fleeshman, whose declaration of love - "I want to get inside you" is telling it like it is - carries distinct melodic echoes of an earlier military man, Giorgio, in Passion. Another Tony winner on loan from New York, the firm-voiced Paulo Szot completes the star roster as a white-clad lothario who seems rarely to stand up straight when he can slither into the hoped-for embrace of one female target or another. Like so much Sondheim, the show makes demands on an audience - but "not demands you can't meet," as an earlier lyric from the same composer (in Merrily We Roll Along) puts it. There's fun to be had in wordplay about " a lotta latte" that could only come from this composer-lyricist's pen, and the triple rhyme of "duck / luck / fuck" is quintessential Sondheim. More pertinent is the show's embrace of darkness, which Mantello's genius manages somehow to keep as featherweight as Marianne's outfits. (The surpassingly witty designer is David Zinn.) Gazing ominously above, as if waiting for an Into the Woods-adjacent Giant, Ferguson's Paul cowers under the absence of the very Eden blithely insisted upon by Marianne. And the smitten young lovers sing unabashedly of "the end of the world", leaving the more philosophical Bishop to ruminate upon "matter that matters, or not".

Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations lovingly make of the music available something complete in itself, Nigel Lilley's orchestra playing us out after the bows. And Sam Pinkleton, represented on Broadway just now with the glorious Oh, Mary!, lends physical definition to the characters' first-act quest for food (itself a journey of sorts into the woods), only towards the very end to send their increasingly desperate, anxious selves rushing towards the footlights. In search of what, exactly: Salvation? Oblivion? The show doesn't say.

Plimpton's brassy Claudia, cut from the same cloth as Company's comparably feisty Joanne, remarks simply that they're "doomed", whereas Marianne insists to the (bitter?) end that "it's a beautiful day". Both women, one gets the impression, are right in their own way. We're here until we're not. And there we are.

• Here We Are at the National Theatre until June 28
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk