Stephen Sondheim has been a bedrock of Jane Krakowski’s career almost since the beginning. The Tony and Olivier award-winning actress — and the mighty comic dynamo of TV’s 30 Rock and Ally McBeal — played Fredrika in an off-Broadway production of A Little Night Music when she was 14. Ten years later she starred in a Broadway revival of Company. “And now, at 29, here I am!” Krakowski, 56, says with more than a trace of the indomitable Jenna Maroney, her reality-defying prima donna from 30 Rock.
And Here We Are indeed — that’s the title of Sondheim’s final, posthumous musical, which is having its UK premiere at the National Theatre in London in a cast led by Krakowski, Rory Kinnear and Tracie Bennett. Here We Are had its premiere in New York in 2023, but only a few of the cast — Bennett is one — have travelled with Joe Mantello’s production.
Krakowski watched the 2023 show from the audience, “and I felt a little jealous … that it was such an honour to have worked on the final Sondheim, to have worked out his final puzzle”. Then things magically slotted together. Krakowski, absent from London since her cracking turn as Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls 20 years ago (coincidentally, her 2005 co-star, Ewan McGregor, is back in the West End this spring too), wanted a new challenge: her “bucket list” goal was to work at the National. She met representatives from the theatre, not knowing what the mooted project was, then discovered it was Here We Are. So now she’s back in the UK, with her son, 14, visiting her on and off from New York (his father is the British fashion designer Robert Godley — the couple separated in 2013).
What was Sondheim like to work with? Just as he does in his songs, he always found the mot juste. “He was intimidating. He would come around after the performance and say just one or two beautifully descriptive words and you’d know exactly what you needed, what spice you needed to add. I’ve never met anybody who was that precise.”
Here We Are, however, had a messy and even tortuous birth. Sondheim’s collaboration with the playwright David Ives was first announced in 2012, eventually coalescing into an adaptation of two Luis Buñuel films, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel. It possibly did not help that in 2016 the composer Thomas Adès wrote a successful opera based on the latter. Sondheim found himself stymied by the second half, but just two months before his death in November 2021 accepted with Ives and Mantello that he would not write any more songs and that Here We Are could go ahead as it was.
“Act I is completely a Sondheim musical and feels like a Sondheim musical,” Krakowski says, doing a better job of talking rapidly than eating her soup when we meet backstage at the National. “The lyrics are so clever and descriptive and have all that Sondheim patter. And then, a quarter through Act II, the music stops.” From then on “it’s a full David Ives play with no singing”.
The cast has been told not to consider it unfinished. “Sondheim knew what it was going to be … ultimately it was better for what the second half is.” Krakowski’s character, Marianne Brink — one half of a smug married couple, alongside Kinnear’s Leo — delivers the composer’s last completed number. The poignancy and privilege of that is not lost on her. “It’s a beautiful bouquet of a song.”
The plot is typically twisty, as befits the creator of so many musicals drawn from unlikely themes. In the first half (drawn fromDiscreet Charm) the Brinks, required to host an impromptu brunch party, lead a group that includes a covert anarchist terrorist on a mostly fruitless and very surreal quest to find a meal. After the interval, adapting the same premise of The Exterminating Angel — Buñuel’s satire of a society blind to the real world — the same characters are trapped in the same room, apparently enduring an apocalypse.
There have been extensive changes since the New York premiere. Political conversations have taken place in rehearsal too. Most of the protagonists of Here We Are are idle rich (Marianne’s husband is described as a billionaire) and Krakowski is aware of the resonances of a drama about entitled, oblivious Americans.
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“I’ve come to England at a time when I don’t agree with all that is happening in my home country. So it’s perhaps apropos that we’re here and doing this play at this time.” There is a reference to Tesla in the script, originally included as a proof of someone’s virtue — now it’s been re-examined so that it’s delivered more sarcastically. Does she think Marianne would have voted for Trump? “Oh God, I don’t think so. But I wonder if her husband did. Jesus. Well, you’ve given me something to take back downstairs.”
Krakowski grew up in New Jersey. “My mother was a teacher and my dad was a chemical engineer, but their passion was always the arts and certainly theatre. And they always had interesting hobbies. One of them was being heavily involved in a community theatre in our neighbourhood. Instead of getting babysitters, they would just bring me.”
The theatre bug bit. “I was taking dance from the age of three — mostly ballet, then it kind of opened up to jazz, then a bit of tap.” At the age of nine she got her first audition in Manhattan — “I waited in line outside of the 46th Street Theatre, I was No 237 or something — and I got picked.”
She wasn’t quite a stage brat — her parents told her she couldn’t take a year off school to play an orphan in the first national tour of Annie — but “by the time I got to high school I knew it was all I really wanted to do”. Her Broadway debut was as Dinah the dining car in Starlight Express, which she played for two years. “My rollerskates are in the Museum of Broadway.” Of course they are.
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In 2024 Krakowski starred in a play called Shit. Meet. Fan and supplied a tongue-in-cheek cast biography that charted her failures rather than her hits. It’s a list of near misses and stillborn TV shows that I took to be satirical, but Krakowski tells me it’s all true.
TV pilots that didn’t make it included Dead Boss — an American spin-off of a comedy by Sharon Horgan — and Taste, in which Krakowski played against Rufus Sewell as a celebrity chef. “It was ahead of its time,” Krakowski protests, noting the later success of Boiling Point and The Bear. “Jim Parsons played the bartender. The next thing he got was Big Bang Theory. And there was little me waiting for 30 Rock to come around.”
Nevertheless, she knew that she had caught a big fish with a leading role in the Nineties smash hit Ally McBeal, which made stars of Calista Flockhart and Lucy Liu, had A-list celebrity cameos that Krakowski reels off incredulously — “Elton John, Tina Turner, Mariah Carey” — and in the “dancing baby” motif produced something that Krakowski reckons might have been TV’s first meme.
The popularity of the show had negative repercussions as well as positive ones. “It became part of popular culture, so the discussion [moved to] whether the skirts were too short, what we all looked like.” Flockhart’s slim figure was pored over by the press. “It spread to everyone in the cast. It was before social media, but it was also a time when you’d go on the red carpet and you were only asked who you were wearing. Paparazzi were everywhere. People like Perez Hilton [the notorious blogger] were able to write whatever they wanted.”
Krakowski bridles a little when I suggest that she made more of her character, the daffy secretary Elaine, than the bimbo she might have been. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the role of a bimbo. Maybe I just don’t treat them that way.” When it came to 30 Rock’s Maroney, “her delusion was so much of her charm, don’t you agree?” Well, yes, that and all the musical skits — Jenna’s hapless career as a pop singer and Broadway star manqué supplied clips that live on in the age of YouTube and X — including a spoof appearance in a Mystic Pizza musical (“when life keeps handing you anchovies/ just cover them up with some extra cheese”) and Maroney’s “No 1 hit in Israel”, the pop song Muffin Top, devoted to the delights of a fuller figure.
Krakowski will still always phone the show’s creator, Tina Fey, if she needs a gag for an awards speech or any kind of quick quip. “I say, ‘Will you sprinkle some of your genius on this?’” Alas, a 30 Rock reunion is unlikely: “I love that the idea is always floating, but I don’t believe it’s on the cards.”
What’s next? When I ask her about finding meaty roles in her fifties and beyond she brings up another skit involving Fey. In the Last F***able Day sketch from Inside Amy Schumer, Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette calmly explain to Schumer how middle-aged women are considered “unf***able” and can’t be cast as romantic leads. Absurd, but also accurate. “It was supposed to be over when you were 40,” Krakowski says.
Yet things are changing. She mentions the comedy Hacks and its multiple Emmy award-winning star, 73-year-old Jean Smart. “She has one of the great roles in comedy and she’s killing it, winning every award. So now at this point in my career I hope the needle keeps moving as I keep ageing. That’s my hope.”
Here We Are is at the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London, to Jun 28
