TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051192/0511410.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 5.7 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 57

The Quirky William Finn


For him, Falsettos fulfills an obsession. For audiences, his
musical about homosexuality, AIDS and families offers the richest
emotions on Broadway.

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    A Broadway musical about a man who leaves his wife and
son for another man, then breaks up with the male lover, woos
him back and ultimately watches him die of aids might not sound
like most people's idea of entertainment. Certainly no other
current musical opens with a song called Four Jews in a Room
Bitching, features a soft-shoe-dancing psychiatrist lilting
about how "everyone hates his parents" or has two women
characters cheerily introduce themselves as "the lesbians from
next door." But then, only Falsettos, which capped off the
Broadway season last week to wide critical acclaim, has music
and lyrics by the quirky, quixotic, querulous and unquenchable
William Finn. Depending on your ears, Finn is either Stephen
Sondheim's natural successor or merely his canniest imitator.
(Both are graduates of Williams College, and Sondheim, it is
said, thinks the resemblance stops there.)

    Like Sondheim, Finn is prone to write tinkly, brittle art
songs that break off in midphrase and to fill them with lyrics
so clever they reward, and maybe require, repeated hearing.
Like Sondheim, he is witty, wistful and wickedly funny. But
Finn is readier to satisfy the playgoer's yearning for a
hummable phrase. In Falsettos he gives every character a big
ballad, ranging from the tender What More Can I Say to the
abandoned wife's showstopper I'm Breaking Down to the AIDS
patient's edgy, sardonic You Gotta Die Sometime. In all, the
three dozen musical numbers add up to the richest emotional
experience offered by any musical on Broadway.

    The path to get there was bumpy. Hartford Stage mounted a
different-looking version last fall that Lincoln Center pledged
to bring to Broadway but then reneged on. With less than three
months left in the season, Fran and Barry Weissler, who have won
three Tony Awards by mounting star-package revivals like 1990's
Fiddler on the Roof with Topol, decided to make this no-stars
gay story their first new musical. Says Fran, a grandmother:
"This was a big departure for us, our usual investors and our
usual audiences. Half of the money in the show [it cost
$950,000 to mount, about a fifth of the average musical] is our
own. But we had to do it -- we couldn't not do it."

    For Finn, 40, the Broadway debut of Falsettos is the
fulfillment of an obsession. In 1979 he wrote a short musical
called In Trousers about Marvin, a repressed homosexual who
hears the mating call of liberation, ends his marriage and, in
one memorable if unnerving moment of stagecraft, sings about the
exquisite pleasures of oral sex with his new boyfriend Whizzer.
Finn makes no bones about the piece's autobiographical flavor:
"Though his history bears no relationship to mine,
temperamentally Marvin is me. He is not easy. He is no joy to
live with. But there is something to admire, I think, in the way
he wants it all. When people say he's a spoiled brat, I just
don't understand."

    Two years later, Finn advanced Marvin's story in March of
the Falsettos, which begins with Marvin envisioning his old and
new lives merging into one big, happy family and ends with him
alone. The narrative was shaped with director James Lapine, who
vaulted from that into becoming Sondheim's director and
librettist on his two most recent Broadway musicals, Sunday in
the Park with George and Into the Woods. But Finn could not seem
to capitalize on his new opportunities.

    For nearly 10 years he tried other stories. Nothing
worked. The one musical he finished, Romance in Hard Times --
about a mystical pregnancy and a Depression soup kitchen -- ran
briefly off-Broadway at Joseph Papp's Public Theater. Says Finn:
"The show wasn't perfect, but parts were brilliant. The score
was spectacular." The reviews were so bad that he was relieved
he had jury duty after it opened: "I figured that if I were in
the courthouse I wouldn't actually commit suicide."

    Finally Finn turned his attention back to Marvin and his
world -- Whizzer, the former wife Trina and son Jason, and
Trina's new husband Mendel, who had met her when he was Marvin's
psychiatrist. Plus, of course, the lesbians, a doctor treating
"frightened bachelors" at the outset of the AIDS epidemic and
a chef who experiments in nouvelle kosher. Says Finn: "I
realized that I was obsessed with these characters. I still am.
I am not interested in writing about anyone else. Everything
that moves and grips me in the theater can be told through these
people. And they all seem to sing quite naturally, which is
vital for a musical. They are all given to that level of
emotional excess."

    By the time Finn resumed, picking up their lives two years
on, the decade that had passed in real life had revealed the
defining impact of AIDS. Moreover, it had deepened his skills.
When Falsettoland debuted, it ranked as the first (and still the
only) great musical of the '90s. Coupled with March of the
Falsettos and material culled from In Trousers, it hits harder.

    Is there more to come in Marvin's life? Finn predicts yes
-- and hopes that this time it emerges faster. "I probably
won't refer to falsettos next time though," he says. "I used the
term because it is for songs outside the normal range of the
voice, and these were characters outside the normal range. There
hadn't been musicals or many plays dealing with homosexuals in
a noncampy way. Now, as our notion of families broadens, these
characters are well within the range."