The Soldier's Dream
Romance and reality in Here We Are
When Here We Are premiered at The Shed late in 2023, “The Soldier’s Dream” quickly emerged as one of its most celebrated and talked-about sequences. It seemed to distill so much of what we love about Sondheim’s work into one remarkable number: a kaleidoscope of reality, artifice, and connection.
Let’s take a closer look at this “soulful, gorgeous, dreamy” sequence.
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“The Soldier’s Dream” opens with a simple enough premise: a lieutenant describes a dream about meeting a girl in a café. But as his story unfolds, reality dissolves at a dizzying pace. Shrouds are offered to all assembled, his mother appears with a sheep—and, under the harsh glare of house lights, even the nature of performance itself is revealed to be unstable.
The number begins not with the Soldier himself, but with his impact on those assembled:
FRITZ
Oh my God — !
That soldier — !COL. MARTIN
That lieutenant —FRITZ
— That lieutenant is so —MARIANNE
Soulful.CLAUDIA
Gorgeous!RAFFAEL
Dreamy!
Seizing on that last word, “dreamy,” Colonel Martin opens the door for all that follows. “At ease, Lieutenant!” he says. “Tell us your dream.”
The Soldier draws us into a world that is at once hazy and hyper-vivid, a dreamscape stitched from longing, absurdity, and theatrical self-awareness. His opening lines set the tone: “I was in a café / Which looked somewhat like this.” This seems at first like a familiar trope: dreams that blur into waking life. He speaks of his café encounter, romantic longing, the mysterious girl whose name sounds “like music,” but which he has forgotten.
What follows, however, is anything but traditional.