A Conversation with Sam Pinkleton
On choreographing Here We Are
Sam Pinkleton, choreographer of Here We Are and director of the recent hit Oh, Mary!, is preparing to bring Stephen Sondheim’s final musical to London. Sam also choreographed Broadway musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, for which he received a Tony Award nomination. It was such a pleasure to talk to Sam about his decade-long journey with Here We Are, from first hearing about the “Untitled Buñuel Sondheim Project” to helping shape its surreal, movement-driven world. Our conversation begins below:
It’s so good to meet you. We’re talking a few months before Here We Are arrives in London, but I’d love to start with your own path towards the show. What were those first conversations like?
I first heard about Here We Are probably over a decade ago, when it was still called “Untitled Buñuel Sondheim Project.” I have never been a particularly ambitious person, believe it or not—but when I heard about this project, it was the only thing I’ve ever heard where I was like, “I want to be in that room.” I love the films, and obviously Stephen Sondheim is Stephen Sondheim.
I remember reading about it for the first time, and then life happened, and many years passed. The show went through all sorts of adventures, none of which I had anything to do with. Maybe a year or so before we did it at The Shed, the amazing producer Sue Wagner took me out, and she had something up her sleeve. At the time, I had consciously decided to step back from choreography. I’ve spent a lot of time being a choreographer, but I’ve always more thought of myself as a director. I was like, “I want to focus on directing.” And just as I said that, Sue Wagner was like, “I have something up my sleeve…” And it was Here We Are.
When she said it, my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it—and at the time, I didn’t even know that it was happening. And I said, “It’s a no-brainer. I don’t even need to look at it. I don’t need to read it.” It’s exactly the kind of thing that you come out of choreography retirement to do. And then, after talking to Joe Mantello and David Ives, and the amazing Rick Pappas from The Sondheim Trust, I very quickly jumped on board.
How soon did you start to have a sense of what the choreography might look and feel like? You had the Buñuel films to draw on, but how much of the actual piece did you get to see or hear initially?
I think in my very first conversation with Joe, maybe even before I knew that I was definitely going to do it, we spoke about the first act, which is the Buñuel film The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The first act is almost entirely people in motion. It’s a story about people driving from place to place. And that’s hard to do on stage. The first conversation I had with Joe was really about the impossibility of it, and the impossibility of rendering the musical in any kind of realistic way. But maybe more importantly, why would we? That’s not what theatre’s good at. And that’s particularly not what Sondheim was invested in. It’s not real life, but it is truth. It has to be truth. But that doesn’t mean naturalism.
And Buñuel is obviously a famous surrealist, so our challenge was how to make this hyper-theatrical without making it like, “There’s a fake car,” or, “There’s a treadmill,” or whatever. Very early on, we were thinking about the most abstract way to approach it. Not to be weird for weird's sake, but just to get at the guts of it. And I also knew pretty early on that it was basically going to be a big empty space. A big empty space made beautiful by David Zinn. There was a lot of trial and error. It was these big questions of what does it feel like to be on a weird, long trip with people that you love or hate, or have complicated relationships with and secrets with? And we started to figure out this puzzle that got more and more stylized as we went along.
The other part, of course, is casting. I knew that we were going to have this extraordinary, unique cast. One of our producers called them the Musical Theatre Avengers, and I think that’s very true for our upcoming cast in London as well. But it’s a cast of individuals. It’s not like an ensemble in a musical. So I feel like part of my job as choreographer and movement director is to learn what makes each of those people unique and to highlight that, to highlight the strange ways they move, and the ways that they’re different—the ways that they come together, and the ways that they break apart. Here We Are truly is a thesis on everything that I love about staging a musical, honestly—even though it’s not a capital D dance show.
Do you remember any initial ideas you had for Here We Are that eventually went in a completely different direction?
I think in some ways the plan for the whole choreography turned around. I think in hindsight this was just fear. I’m always absolutely shaken with terror at the beginning of a process. And this was the last Sondheim musical, so the pressure seemed especially high to get it right. But I think at the beginning I was very tentative about what the approach was going to be. I was very much like, “Well, let’s sort of follow the actors, and let’s see. I don’t want it to be too fussy.” I think a musical can be ruined by too much dancing, and I kind of made that version. And it just lacked an edge.
And to the great credit of Joe Mantello, he really encouraged me to be unafraid, to make it weird and to make it sharp. And I’m actually much better at weird than I am at naturalism. I’m not good at that, and I also don’t like seeing it on stage. There was a very clear moment in the rehearsal process where I felt kind of liberated to just get weird. And frankly, I think that’s what Steve and David did when they were making the show. Buñuel is such an inspiring but also really challenging roadmap, because it’s genuinely strange. And to allow yourself as a choreographer to just get weird was a major turning point. And ultimately—and it’s part of why I’m so excited to revisit it in London—it got me so much closer to what I think this thing actually is. And frankly, I think there’s more work to do to crack it back open.
Speaking of bringing the show to London, I’d love to ask you in really practical terms how that operates from your perspective. It’s been a couple of years since the show premiered, and there’s a substantially (though not entirely) new cast. What will your actual day-to-day look like in that rehearsal room? Do you have the freedom to go in different directions than you did before?
Joe Mantello and I will both be there rehearsing it. It definitely is not like opening a box, taking the musical out, putting in the new people, and hoping for the best. I’d never want to do that, frankly. I feel excited about the opportunities that a new group of people and two more years of life brings—and inevitably we’re going to change things, because we’re different people. We’re looking at it through different eyes.
Just in a practical way, because the score is complex and non-negotiable—“it is what it is”—we will start the process by getting that music in their bones, just as we did in New York. Nearly the entire first act is these long, overlapping musical sequences, these travel sequences where everybody’s singing different stuff. And you just can’t work beyond that if people don’t know it inside and out. It would just descend into absolute chaos and frustration. So it will be a very music-forward process.
I feel like I’m coming into it knowing what the blueprint is, knowing what I think worked and what didn’t work, knowing what I think the roles are. And I’m excited to apply that to a totally new group of people who are going to throw new challenges my way. So it’s not a total restart. I feel like I’m coming at it with so much more information. But it’s also not like we’re doing 42nd Street for the 10th time, and person A stands there, person B stands there, and person C stands there.
Since the original production of Here We Are, you’ve directed Oh, Mary!, which has been such a huge success. I wondered whether you see a connection between these two shows, both of them so daring, and each offering something genuinely new to theatre audiences.
That’s a very complimentary read of both of those shows, so thank you! I would say for myself, I completely agree with you. Part of what drew me to both of them was that I had never seen or done anything like them. That is what I’m interested in. Even if it’s a massive failure, I would so much rather do something I’ve never done before, and I would so much rather see something I’ve never seen before, period. We only get one life. I absolutely do not want to keep seeing the same things over and over.
There’s a Sondheim quote that immediately comes to mind here. I think it was my dear friend Mana Allen, who was in the original company of Merrily We Roll Along, who told me that Sondheim spoke of surprise being the engine of theatre. And it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever heard. To me, it’s like, pin it to the wall! That is all that matters.
I feel that way about Here We Are. It’s genuinely surprising. And to me, the total motor of Oh, Mary!—and frankly, I think the success of it—is surprise. It is a journey through a lot of very carefully articulated surprises that you just have to see to understand. And I do think that is part of what has made people enjoy it. I’m sure there are plenty of people who hate it, but it seems like part of the enjoyment of it is just the sheer scale of surprise of the play. I misquoted Sondheim throughout the entire Oh, Mary! rehearsal process because it really is all I care about. I will see things, and I’m like, “I mean, it was good… But I wasn’t surprised.”
Do you see Here We Are as your last choreography-only project on this kind of scale? Are you still looking principally to direct from here on out?
I’m not sure. I mean, I’m sure if I say to you I’ll never choreograph again, all I will do for the rest of my life is choreograph. To me, it goes back to that thing about doing things you’ve never done, and seeing things you’ve never seen. I’m interested in making exciting things with exciting people that give audiences the opportunity to live in a world that is slightly better than the one that they live in. I think that’s my job.
Am I desperate to go choreograph a play about some middle class people getting a divorce? I am not. But I love movement. I love dancing. I actually love dancing. I love cutting loose, and I hope I feel that way until I’m very old. But I’m very nourished. I mean, I mostly just feel incredibly privileged to continue to work in theatre, as the world becomes increasingly hostile toward it. But I don’t know what will happen. Who knows?
What a beautifully Sondheimian note to end on. So many possibilities...
That’s the excitement.