My one big 'What If' of what an ideal 'Here We Are' would have looked like.
I normally find endless speculation on hypotheticals that will never occurr quite tiering and useless, and this is in some form no different, but I still can't stop thinking about it.
Disclamer: I am taking the interview with David Ives and Joe Mantello as a base-line. While there is the possibility of them both portraying themselves in the best light, I do think that they were trying to recount the history of the show's development as accurately as possible and I am inclined to believe them in most if not all that they have said in that interview.
I do think the show works the way it is now, but it was not the ideal show the creators had envisioned for the longest time during its development and it is my believe that the show would have been much stronger with songs on the qualitative level of the first act. Songs could have given the core characters the emotional depth of their personal revalations that Ives' script was not able to fully realise in my opinion. The pivot to the version we have now was a last-ditch effort to save a show motivated by Joe Mentello and was basically the best version to ever realistically be finished and put on the stage.
The big things that seemed to have led to Sondheim slowing down and getting stuck at the moment of the character's entrapment are (in no particular order as I cannot in good conscious weigh the importance of these factors against each other):
Reasons for the general slowness of his progress:
-his age (of course) and the natural health complications,
-his famous procrastination,
-his perfectionism and fears of living to up the expectations of the sondheim legend,
-his collaborator David Ives not being able to set meaningful deadlines for him,
Reasons for the complete standstill of progress, stopping after Mariannes bear encounter:
-his need for a change in the feel and style of the score from that critical and pivotal narrative point on,
-COVID, which made the very dark situation of the trapped characters in a room all to real for the quaranteened composer, turning him off of working on the show as a whole and focusing his attention back to All Together Now for almost a year before being presented with Joe's idea in May of '21.
Now let's imagine an ideal scenario with sondheim 10 or 20 years younger, with more strength, without COVID, with Ives being a bit more willing to push Sondheim when needed like for example Hal or Lapine was able to, how do you think the part of the show that is now song-less should/could have been musicalised?
During all the time of them working on the show and Davids script basically done until the rewrites of '21, there must have been thrown around and thought about many song ideas for the second act (like in any production history of a musical). Where do you think would songs have been placed and what would they have focused on, how would sondheim have approached the last scenes musically, what form would the content have dictated?
The reason why this does not feel like another meaningless hypothetical to me is because I am someone very interested in how musicals are written (specifically by sondheim) and I am a musician/composer myself that is next to my main field of study/work (Jazz) at least intellectually interested in writing musicals. Unfinished works are endlessly fascinating and even seductive in such a situation. You have everything set already. It's like one of the puzzles that sondheim loved so much. It is daunting trying to start writing or conceptualising a whole new musical, but continuing an unfinished project is something else entirely. This post may fit equally well into r/musicalwriting for that reason.
Like all works of music left partially unfinished because of the death of the creator, be it Mozart's requiem or Bach's unfinished fugue; at some point people will seriously try to finish the masters work. It requires an enormous ego to think that one could concur the mountain that the Giants were not able to climb. Which may be why these attempts often reveal more of the completionists own interpretation and feelings towards the original work and creator rather than the original work.
Nevertheless I can't wait to hear what people will come up with in the future.
I cannot imagine myself ever seriously commiting to writing or composing anything related to the second act of Here We Are, but that does not stop one from dreaming of what could be/could have been. I may too, like sondheim at the end of his life, be more interested in thinking and talking about writing a musical, than actually writing it.
I am sorry it is 2 am and I need to sleep. If you think this is a stupid and unproductive thing to think about, that's fine, I just needed to write this down and share it with people and maybe discuss some ideas.