A Conversation with Tracie Bennett
We speak to Tracie Bennett about Here We Are, Sondheim's final musical
It was a real thrill to speak to Tracie Bennett about Here We Are and much more besides. Tracie is the only person in the world to have performed in the first professional production of Sondheim’s first and last musicals. She also appeared as Carlotta in the National Theatre’s Follies in 2017 & 2019, and in 1984 she played Mary in Europe’s first professional production of Merrily We Roll Along. Tracie won Olivier Awards for her performances in She Loves Me and Hairspray, and portrayed Judy Garland in the West End and on Broadway, in End of the Rainbow. She is also known to millions in the UK as Coronation Street’s Sharon Gaskell. Our conversation begins below:
It’s been several months now since Here We Are premiered, but the recording was released just a few weeks ago. What has it felt like to be part of the Sondheim’s final show?
I didn’t read any reviews. I might in a couple of years. It’s something that you go into and it’s so intense and brilliant and fun, and it’s dark and light and creative and massive and all these things. And then suddenly it’s over, and I’m here redecorating. I’m still processing it. To be honest, I’m still processing doing Merrily when I was 20. I’ve got a Merrily poster in my bedroom, and it’s not like I sit here every day singing that show. But sometimes I’ll be turning my light off and I’ll glance at the poster and I’ll just go, “God, what a time that was.” Who’d have thought that my first show would be a Sondheim, and that I’d be in his last show as well? So it feels bookended in a way, which is very special. And who’d have thought that I’d ever be involved with a show of his without him being in the room? You just don’t think like that, do you?
You mentioned bookending there, and you are the only person in the world to have appeared in Sondheim’s first and last show. That must feel pretty special. But more broadly, how closely do you associate the different roles you’ve played with specific times in your own life?
I’d actually been thinking about that. At the time, you just do the work. You don’t think about your future. You don’t plan, “Oh, I will know Sondheim” or stuff like that. The first one in my mind, sillily, is Merrily, even though it obviously wasn’t the first one written. I started off doing Merrily, and I didn’t do Saturday Night [Sondheim’s first show] until 10 years later. But oddly, I did think about the youth I had doing Merrily. Of course, Mary is old at the beginning of the show, so you’ve got to play Mary the bitter, twisted critic, and then it goes back to when they’re happier and friends again. We were the first to do Merrily in Europe. Broadway was a thousand million miles away to us. But we were like, “Let’s just make it the best it can be.” We didn’t understand why it hadn’t worked on Broadway—we just didn’t think like that. But to do the very first and very last one he did… I feel very lucky, really. Very lucky.
And since we’re speaking so soon after the release of Here We Are on disc, how do you find the process of recording cast albums?
I find them bizarre! Particularly if you’re playing a very visual part, or there’s certain body language that’s odd, or certain things that you’ve chosen to do in rehearsal that nobody can see. Listeners don’t necessarily know what the setting is, and especially with Here We Are, because many people won’t have seen it. You’ve got to clarify what you’re doing, but you can’t really do it in situ because it might be more mangled than what you’d want for a recording. Or you might be really, truly crying and all the tears are running down, so there’s all this heavy breathing, but on a recording it’s harder to do that because then that’s all you’re hearing. And then you’re going, “What the hell is she doing?” In the character world that I live in, I’ve got to help the audience but also not help the audience. When I played Judy [Garland], I’m not being Judy on the album. It was completely different when you saw it in context. And for Here We Are, they put a lot of the dialogue in, which is great, but there are almost always at least some edits.
And of course, the cast album of a new show often leads people to speculate about potential future productions…
Well, people talk about this. I know Joe [Mantello, director of Here We Are] says this very openly and very publicly: it was a tribute, like a painting, for people to take a look at. It wasn’t intended to be commercial. They didn’t put it up for Tony Awards. Joe didn’t want that pressure, and neither did David Ives. Nobody wanted that pressure. We wanted to go in, work hard, play hard, argue, laugh, fight, sing: blood, sweat, laughter. All of it. All of the fascinations of what theater is and should be was in that room. And while you’re there, within that, you’re constantly collaborating. It’s never finished. Nothing’s finished. Saturday Night is not finished either, because there it went, but there’s more to that story. Or take Follies: what do they do after the show that we see? Does Carlotta go back to that young man? Is she still with him next year? So it’s always open-ended. The ball is always being passed.
With Here We Are, there’s a structure obviously. People say, “What’s it about?” And you don’t know what to say, because it’s not just about one thing. It’s there for interpretation. And I think we all used to say it—Joe Mantello says it a lot, and he said it in the opening night speech before we went on—“sacrifice something safe.” Stephen said it first—of course he did. And honestly, I’m still thinking about that process, because you just want to carry on creating something every night, and sacrificing something safe. You don’t change your blocking, but you go, “How about if I laughed here instead of cried?” And you had the license to do that. We all understood that phrase straight away, because the two films it was based on were so surreal and so European that sometimes people would go, “Why is there a bear?” And you’re going, “When you look at Salvador Dali, why is there a clock there?” You can’t explain it. But in the main, I’m glad to say that people just went with it, because it did sound ridiculous coming to the bar and someone asking, “So why did she dance with the grizzly bear?” People stopped asking after a while, because that’s just what it is. Because that’s what Sondheim and the team chose to pick up from the films and by putting all these elements together.
So for Joe Mantello and all the team, all the cast and the musicians, it was a gift, like putting a picture in an art gallery. It became that picture that you hang—and you can talk about it, love it or hate it. So it’s interesting to throw up as a debate, and I think that’s what theater should do. There are millions of opinions; everybody’s got one. And if some people wanted more—well, that’s good, to leave people wanting more. Some people are absolutely thrilled and it’s growing on them with each new listen. Well… it is what it is.
Of course there’s always going to be the question of what might have happened if Stephen was in the room. I can only know what was said to me in other shows. I can tell you for a fact that in Follies, Steve said to me, “Tracie, I’m begging you now, never do "I’m Still Here" in any cabaret form that you might want to do.” He said, “I cannot stand it.” And I said, “On my honor, Steve, I will never do a cabaret, never mind sing that in it.” As an actor, you’re on Carlotta’s journey, and not many of us have experienced that on a big scale, at that level. Everybody’s done it here and there, but not like that. In Follies, Carlotta is on her own, pretty much. She comes in alone. She’s happy with herself. She makes a decision not to drink, because she says she’s been in rehab. So I made the decision not to drink every time a cocktail was there. And she’s actually one of the only ones who’s happy as she leaves as well.
But with “I’m Still Here,” she just starts telling the people around her about this and that. It’s not a list song even. It can be if you want it to be, but every line has to mean something for Carlotta’s journey. I worked hard at my version of it. So if anyone goes, “She mustn’t be too bitter and twisted at the end,” no. You try and make different choices throughout, so that you can keep it fresh, so that you do go in and out of “I’m proud of myself,” but then also, “I’m really angry about that.” “Oh, what a fool I was. What a dick. Look at this defiance.” I wanted a structure of all that, but then still to keep it fresh each night. If I’m more optimistic one night and more defiant the next night, well, hey, I’m not a robot—and that’s live theater.
And in Here We Are, as you say, it can be so tempting to wonder about its completeness, and all these other things—and then you realize that in The Exterminating Angel [the basis for Act II] it makes total sense to run out of music. The piano stops, and it works perfectly.
Exactly. Why would you sing after the piano stops? There’s no music in the room. And I know there’s an orchestra there, and I know that’s ridiculous to say because it is a musical. But it becomes this play of, hmm, is this about death and life and coming from a surface-type place of the bourgeoisie treating waiters horribly and spending $50 million on a park and giving it away to the revolution, to actually thinking, “Shit, there’s a war outside. Maybe we can’t leave,” or however you want to put it. People went away going, “Oh, it’s about that.” “Oh, no. Actually, it’s about that.” It was just so interesting for us.
With this particular show, we had to be brave enough to surreal it up a bit. To not heighten it, but to really enjoy the surreal side of it—and not apologize for it, or be too frightened of it or too reverent of it. It’s such an interesting process where you’re not a massive, massive machine with thousands of people and flying things everywhere, but just to do a play with six hardcore personalities, and then two weirdos on the side! Glorious, glorious, glorious work. It wasn’t easy, in the most brilliant, creative way.