The musical “Falsettos” came into being in the early 1990s as the fusion of two one-act, sung-through musicals composed by William Finn nearly a decade apart.
“March of the Falsettos,” written in the late 70s and set in 1979, deals with the family fallout from the central character Marvin’s having left his wife Trina and son Jason for his gay lover Whizzer. In “Falsettoland,” which premiered in 1989 but is set in 1981 as a continuation of the story, Marvin finally finds relationship happiness only to see Whizzer afflicted with the as-yet unnamed disease suddenly devastating the New York gay community.
The beautiful, stylish, last-days-of-disco-infused production of the combined “Falsettos,” produced by Court Theatre in partnership with Timeline Theater Company, reveals an important truth. Sometimes, the more dated a show becomes, the more resonant it can be.
I’m not suggesting this show delivers a more emotional gut-punch now than when it premiered on Broadway in 1992, when developing symptoms of AIDS still felt like a likely death sentence. What I mean is that director Nick Bowling’s historical perspective on Finn and co-book-writer James Lapine’s deep-dive into people who exist in a specific time and place, in a culture, makes the show and its stunning score — as witty and impressively sophisticated as ever — a deeply meaningful reflection on what our world is like today.
The full-on period elements of the show — Theresa Ham’s costumes heavy on brown, orange, corduroy, florals, and big collars; Arnel Sanciano’s set with mustard and pumpkin-colored just-past-mid-century-modern furniture and rounded, portal-like windows (through one of which we can glimpse the minimal orchestra) — provide their own entertainment value while never being distracting. They also provide context for a superlative set of performances.
As Marvin, Stephen Schellhardt captures the right nebbish quality of a character who’s the lead mostly because he gets the love songs, but also because he connects everyone, including bringing together his psychiatrist Mendel (a wonderful Jackson Evans, capturing likable perversity) with his wife Trina (Sarah Bockel, whose absolute believability and physicality makes her solo “I’m Breaking Down” a showstopper).
Those two eventually marry — producing a relationship that is both happy and based on an overwhelming feeling of guilt from the start.
As Whizzer, Jack Ball ably finds what’s grounded in a character most others see as pretty but shallow, except for pre-teen Jason (Charlie Long, who alternates with Eli Vander Griend), who for some, charming reason sees Whizzer as wise. Long delivers a ridiculously mature performance here with both the comedy and the drama, acting always as the sympathetic, perpetually exasperated innocent amidst emotional chaos, and he only gets better in Act II when the plot concerns his impending Bar-Mitzvah.
Finn is, in tribute to his Boston roots, a wicked excellent composer, one of the few who can bear comparisons to Sondheim for his combination of music and lyrical skills as well as his commitment to psychological depth, adding to those his personal offbeat whimsy (his later commercial masterpiece is the effervescent “25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”). Finn gets great help from Lapine, also a Sondheim partner, who helped him weave a series of set pieces about characters who are both sane and crazy, overly articulate and completely confused, into a coherent narrative.
What’s most interesting and I think unique here is that Bowling’s embrace of the era specifics makes us perpetually aware of all the differences between the world of these characters and today. It’s set before cell phones and social media took families away from the dining table, before Prozac replaced most talk psychiatry, before gay marriage made the word “gay lover” thankfully obsolete; before we knew the term “toxic masculinity” and just considered that get-dinner-on-the-table-and-adore-me attitude to be a guy’s generic expectation.
It even evokes recent “befores,” things that have occurred since this show was revived on Broadway with a star cast in 2016: the spreading of a deadly virus in 2020 that terrified the whole world, rather than a seemingly virus-targeted community; the events of October 7, 2023, which manifested an antisemitism that’s blissfully unthinkable to the characters here; and a certain election that seems to represent the triumphant return of a view of manhood that this show — ultimately about Marvin getting in touch with his emotions — was already rejecting.
For a show so rooted in its time, Bowling brings across a production that has so much to say, unexpectedly, about ours.