To Be... Continued.
This week, we reach a quiet milestone: every Stephen Sondheim musical has now opened and closed in both New York and London.
For nearly seven decades, theatre’s twin capitals have danced their transatlantic dance of first productions, original casts, and opening nights. It’s a dance that began with West Side Story in 1957: Eisenhower was U.S. president, Macmillan was U.K. prime minister, and Stephen Sondheim was twenty-seven years old.
As Here We Are reaches the end of its run at London’s National Theatre, that long, beautiful dance draws to a close. Sondheim’s body of work stands complete, revealed, unveiled. The shows themselves, of course, are not fixed or frozen in time. They endure, carried forward not only by revivals, but by the questions they pose, the contradictions they contain, the parts of ourselves they reveal.
They are somewhere a part of our lives. And it looks like they’ll stay.
Nonetheless, with this particular dance now concluding, we cannot help but feel what literary critic Frank Kermode first called “the sense of an ending.” It is fitting, then, that as we mark this moment, we can find both comfort and clarity in Here We Are itself. For it is in Here We Are, in a beautifully crafted exchange penned by David Ives, that we find one last meditation on being, endings, and the curious possibility of continuation.
Here We Are, Act II. While everyone else sleeps, Marianne finds the Bishop in a corner, nibbling not popcorn, but paper. “This is A Tale of Two Cities,” he explains. “The classics. Always nourishing— / Now literally so.” Marianne longs to discuss “real things,” and the Bishop does his best. He clears his throat, accepts her slippers like a holy relic, and sets out, haltingly, to explain “Being.”
What follows is less a lecture than a lurch, an improvisation in real time. “Yes. Being. Well. Uh, first of all— / You might say— / We’re here / Actually here / On Earth / Most likely / Though perhaps not…” His language stumbles forward, unsure-footed. He makes room for doubt even in the act of asserting: “most likely,” “perhaps not.”
And yet, in its very wobble, the Bishop’s speech lands with surprising emotional precision. It is, in miniature, a cosmology of uncertainty. He sketches the human condition like a man who isn’t quite sure if his pen has ink. To paraphrase: We are here (probably), for a while (probably), among others (probably), and then—we’re not. What, then, comes next? According to the Bishop, “We spend eternity with God— / Or go to hell / If there happens to be one / Or else we pass into complete nothingness / A total void / Forever and ever / That we’re actually unaware of / Because we’re not here anymore / The End.”
The Bishop offers no simple comfort, no doctrine, no anchor. He shrinks from metaphysics into metaphor, and repeatedly grounds the cosmos in objects: “these beautiful satin slippers.” He shares Samuel Beckett’s grammar of faltering, of truth wrapped in a shrug. And like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, he is caught between cosmic inquiry and practical distraction. He can cling to those slippers, but perhaps not to any promise of salvation.
Many believers see Being as bound inextricably to God’s self-revelation. To them, our existence has structure, direction, divine authorship. But the Bishop’s version isn’t structured at all. It’s a looseleaf theology, half-eaten like the pages of A Tale of Two Cities. There is no center, no certainty—just the gnawing awareness of contingency and time.
And yet, this is not nihilism. It’s not despair. It’s something gentler: a comic theology of ambiguity. He speaks plainly, delicately, sincerely. For all its fumbling, the Bishop’s meditation honors the mystery it can’t explain. And when he’s done, Marianne doesn’t challenge him or roll her eyes. Instead, she just smiles and says:
What a world, hmm?
With Being, and everything.
The Bishop returns Marianne’s slippers. Around them, snow begins to fall. And it is in that stillness that Marianne asks the most important question of the show (and, perhaps, of our lives):
So — just to be clear —
If all of that is “Being,”
What are we supposed to do about it?
The Bishop answers with the gentlest shrug imaginable:
I suppose—
Be here.
Until we’re not.
It’s almost an evasion, but not quite. Not defeat, exactly, but a bow to the ungraspable. There’s warmth in it, even comfort. As if presence itself were a form of purpose.
Marianne tries a rejoinder:
To be continued!
And here’s where the magic happens. The Bishop replies:
Exactly!
“To be” … continued.
Until otherwise notified.
To be… continued. Yes, it’s wordplay. But it might also be the most honest answer we will ever get to the question Marianne poses. It’s not a thesis, but a posture. Not a declaration, but a way of sitting with the question itself. The Bishop rewrites Hamlet, and he does so with a kind of quiet grace. Not “To be, or not to be,” with all its thunder and tragedy, but something smaller, and strangely braver: “To be… for now.”
The Bishop’s answer allows for unknowing. It makes space for slippers, and snow, and secrets. It gives dignity to doubt. And there is something palpably liturgical about this candlelit exchange. Those satin slippers, held like a holy book. That torn paper, a kind of communion wafer. The sacred slips into the secular, and the secular into something like prayer.
And so we return to where we began: a quiet milestone, reached not with fanfare but with something like the Bishop’s gentle shrug. The transatlantic dance that began in 1957 has drawn to a close, but in Here We Are, Sondheim and Ives offer us a different kind of choreography: one that honors the stumble as much as the step, the pause as much as the motion.
“On then with the dance,” says Heidi in Follies. “No backward glance.” It’s good advice.
The Bishop’s improvised theology, in all its beautiful uncertainty, feels like an apt benediction for a body of work that has always lived more in searching questions than in easy answers.
The canvas is complete, but the conversation continues. The dance goes on.
What a world, hmm? With Sondheim, and everything.
loved it
Saw the show about 2 weeks ago and that conversation between Marianne and the Bishop is still playing in my head