MusicalFare’s “Falsettos”: Growing Up Is Hard to Do
Posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010
by bunjamin
Pictured (l to r): Pamela Rose Mangus, Michele Marie Roberts, Ben Schafer, John Fredo, Marc Sacco, Louis Colaiacovo and Debbie Pappas in “Welcome to Falsettoland.” Photo: Chris Cavanagh/MusicalFare Theatre
“Falsettos” at MusicalFare: Growing Up Is Hard to Do
By Ben Siegel
Jason has been pushed into a corner. He cannot, at the tender but surprisingly wise age of 11, find in his unconventional family the one thing he desperately needs: Stable guidance. His parents, loonier than Canadian currency, take turns unraveling themselves in front of our precocious pre-teen. As an audience, we are merely along for the ride––an awkward, uncomfortable, confusing and occasionally toxic ride.
But don’t let this drama fool you. “Falsettos” is a comedy. Composer and lyricist William Finn (with co-librettist James Lapine) does everything he can to make you forget that the story of Jason, his divorced parents Trina and Marvin, Marvin’s lover Whizzer (the much younger man he left Trina for), the family’s psychiatrist Mendel (who courts and marries Trina), and the lesbian couple next door, is something other than hilarious. Oftentimes, this family on the brink of total self-destruction has only a gimmicky show tune or reverent bar mitzvah ceremony to hold itself together.
Like Yiddish theater, these characters are juggling more than matzo balls.
MusicalFare Theatre is enjoying a current revival of its popular 1995 staging of “Falsettos,” a combination of two one-act musicals (1981’s “March of the Falsettos” and 1990’s “Falsettoland”) that are bookmarked by the rarely seen 1978 one-act, “In Trousers.” The show’s last mounting, at the now-defunct downtown Pfeifer Theatre, was warmly received (though unseen by this reviewer, who was busy planning for his own bar mitzvah that year).
Three cast members from that production––John Fredo (Marvin), Pamela Rose Mangus (the caretaking Dr. Charlotte) and Debbie Pappas (Trina)––reprise their roles in this staging. Three of MusicalFare’s youngest and brightest stalwarts––Louis Colaiacovo (Mendel), Marc Sacco (Whizzer) and Michele Marie Roberts (lesbian kosher caterer Cordelia)––and Orchard Park seventh grader Ben Schafer, as Jason, round out the cast.
It is a tall order to weave this many individual characters into a pleasing portrait of relatives and friends. Director Randall Kramer realizes the strengths of most of his bunch, though runs into trouble with a few of the central relationships.
Whizzer is Marvin’s young, cool, attractive new mate. It is reasonable that a soul-searching 11-year-old would confide in a figure like Whizzer when his parents are clearly not up to the task. But rarely do we feel that special bond between the two youngsters, which is important, especially when their connection is what eventually helps tie up loose ends. They need each other’s relative sanity in times of strife, though their do-or-die desperation isn’t always apparent in their scenes together.
Fredo’s Marvin is a curious one. He asks for our patience in understanding his fragmented family, but then doesn’t go on to prove he is worth it. It’s as if he thinks his ex-wife’s neuroses (which Pappas nails exquisitely in “I’m Breaking Down”), his son’s desire for balance, and his lover’s need for attention just appeared out thin air. One can’t blame Marvin for outing himself and attempting to pick up the pieces––especially courageous given the volatile political climate of the 1980s––but Fredo doesn’t bother endearing himself to his audience, who could use his sympathy the most.
Colaiacovo, as Mendel, does a fine job giving his patients some psychoanalytical perspective, especially in the adorably irreverent “Everyone Hates His Parents,” though you must take it all with a grain of salt. This is the doctor, after all, who marries a patient’s ex-wife, also a patient.
If there’s one thing you can say about Finn’s view of the modern American family, it’s that love, like life, is not always fair. “Love is blind / Love can tell a million stories / Love’s unkind / Spiteful in a million ways,” this motley crew sings at the top of the show. They sure live up to it.
The mistake one might make when looking at Finn’s work is that his characterizations appear shallow. Take other “crazy upbringing” stories made trendy by a slew of early-2000s young, gay memoirists. David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have their own takes on what disconnects a room of related people. Their stories are no less clever, no less painful, than that of the family in “Falsettos,” though perhaps where Finn succeeds is by capitalizing on the theatricality of it all.
If it can appear in this show, from time to time and song to song, that revealing a family’s zaniness is the only way to be irreverent about one’s adolescence, that being quirky is the only way to be unique, then that would be selling Finn’s semi-autobiographical work way short. True, his caricatures––I mean characters––are often too frenzied to be recognizable as real, their trials and tribulations too sensational to be moving. But I dare you to find a family story that’s steeped in honesty and not simultaneously bonkers. Finn is nothing if not honest, and therein lies the value here.
In Jason, we have a hero we can root for, even want to save ourselves. His brief moments of interjecting narration remind us that Finn’s star is his own wit. And that’s all right, considering Schafer’s adept timing. His eyes roll as if on a river, yet it’s apparent it’s not because he gives Mrs. Schafer a hard time at home. He clearly understands the cynicism of this piece, and exploits it only within the confines of his character’s narrative.
That a young actor can possess such maturity on stage––thoughtful, informed maturity, mind you; not an ability to merely stand still––is essential in this show. It means the world to Jason’s wackadoo family that he can be the sole grown-up even when he should not have to be. Ultimately they turn to him for guidance, in a final scene that exhibits this young man’s unreasonable sense of reason and Finn’s poetic pen. This is where our tensions begin to ease, for the first and only time.
It is in this melodramatic, but satisfying, end that we understand what Jason has been trying to tell us all along: Growing up is hard to do, but it’s a lot easier than not growing at all.
For more information about “Falsettos” at MusicalFare Theatre, in residence at Daemen College in Amherst, visit MusicalFare.com. The show runs through April 3.
