Ten years after March of the Falsettos William Finn and James Lapine brought forth its sequel, Falsettoland.

It was also a one act musical, completely sung through, but it was intended to form the second act of a two act evening, and the two one acts shortly became Falsettos.

While the first act takes place in 1979, when Jason is ten years old, the second act begins about two years later when he is twelve and half, and it deals with the frantic preparations for his bar mitzvah. As with true love, the course of the bar mitzvah preparations do not run smoothly, and there are complications, life intrudes, and it seems like the bar mitzvah will have to be canceled altogether or at least postponed indefinitely.

Two additional characters were added, and over the years, Lapine and Finn have continued to tinker with the show, adding new songs and revising existing ones, and most of the changes have been for the better.

One of the new songs, “I’m Breaking Down”, was added to the first act. It’s a tour de force solo number for Trina that always stops the show. Referring to this song, someone once said to William Finn, “if you’re so smart how come you put the eleven o’clock number at eight thirty?” 

In case you haven’t guessed, I regard Falsettos as one of my favorite musicals that wasn’t written by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim. It can be riotously funny with the right cast and direction, as well as deeply moving.

Much as I hate to mention Frank Rich, let alone quote him, he was a decent theater critic before he started turning out political hack pieces, and he was a champion of the show from its earliest incarnation. On July 12, 1992, he published this piece in the nytimes. Note that the Vice-President that he’s talking about is the one who couldn’t spell “potato”.

The week that the Vice President began lecturing the country about family values, I decided to take my children — Nat, 12, and Simon, 8 — to a family musical on Broadway. Our options included:

• “The Secret Garden,” a show about an orphaned girl who is raised by her widowed uncle.
• “Les Miserables,” in which another orphan, the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute, is adopted by a bachelor who is never home.
• “Guys and Dolls,” the story of a compulsive gambler and a nightclub dancer who have had sex without benefit of marriage for more than a decade.
• “Cats,” which tells of a feline prostitute’s aspirations to ascend to heaven.

All things considered, I decided that the most wholesome choice would be “Falsettos,” the William Finn musical in which the hero, Marvin, sings in his first number of his overwhelming desire to be part of “a tightknit family, a group that harmonizes.”

The Vice President might not agree. Though “Falsettos” offers such traditional family tableaux as a Little League baseball game and a bar mitzvah, it is set in an America where, as one song has it, “the rules keep changing” and “families aren’t what they were.” Marvin has left his wife, Trina, and his 12-year-old son, Jason, for a male lover, Whizzer. 

Actually Frank Rich was a better political pundit when he was a theater critic than when he became an actual pundit. Go figure. And one minor correction: Marvin’s son was 10 when Marvin left him but 12 in the second act when they are planning his bar mitzvah.

In the mid-90s the Arden Theatre mounted a production that I thought was nearly spot on perfect, and I went back to see it a second time, dragging my occasional theater buddies, Simone and Chris, along with me, and they loved it as well. The only flaw in the Arden’s production, I felt, was that the actor playing Whizzer had a much stronger voice than the one playing Marvin, and he just couldn’t resist overpowering Marvin in their duets. Other than that (and I think the director should have reined him in) I didn’t think it could be improved upon, and I’d love to have a video of that production.

What I do have is a bunch of videos of various other productions, most of them of not very good video quality as they are bootlegs. 

There are a couple exceptions.

Before it was taken down from YouTube, I was able to grab a very good video of a Rutgers University production from 2022. It’s a very well cast show, the only quibbles I have are the sound isn’t always the best, and I take issue with some of the directorial choices, but otherwise it’s quite good, and I’m glad I have a copy, but I wouldn’t recommend the video to anyone who doesn’t know the show well because a lot of the critical lyrics are nearly impossible to hear. In any case, as I said, a day or two after I discovered it on YouTube, it was taken down.

And then there is the 2016 Broadway revival which was broadcast on PBS. There was never a DVD or blu-ray released but there are two good versions currently on YouTube. And it’s definitely worth seeing. Christian Borle, Andrew Rannells, Stephanie J. Block, and Brandon Uranowitz played Marvin, Whizzer, Trina, and Mendel respectively. Tracie Thoms played Dr. Charlotte, Betsy Wolfe played Cordelia, and Anthony Rosenthal played Jason. Once again James Lapine was the director.

Here is “The Year of the Child” from that production.

When it was recorded over two nights in the theater for viewing on PBS, several of the lyrics were changed to remove words that would offend [people who are offended by certain words]. As this was to be broadcast over the airwaves, I guess they had to remove those words to keep the FCC off their backs. So “asshole” became “jackass” and “I can’t fucking deal with that” became “I don’t know how to deal with that”, for example. I certainly prefer that to not recording the show at all or bleeping out the words.

Other songs from the second act include “The Baseball Game”, “Everyone Hates His Parents”, and perhaps my favorite of William Finn’s work “Unlikely Lovers”, a ballad that begins as a duet for Marvin and Whizzer but soon expands into a quartet with the next door neighbors Charlotte and Cordelia.

Some folks compare William Finn to Stephen Sondheim. I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, there is no comparison. They each do what they do (or in Sondheim’s case what he did) and there is no need to compare them. And there is no mistaking one for the other. I might have more to say about that in a later post.

As of this writing, here is what is on YouTube.

There are two complete videos of the recording made of the 2016 production. One is called Gay Jewish Linguine in an attempt to pretend it is not a video of the Falsettos 2016 production. I have news for that uploader: if the copyright holder wants to take it down, they’ll find it and take it down.

The other one is of slightly higher video quality and it has teeny tiny subtitles embedded in it that are only readable if you watch it on a large screen. It is just called Falsettos (2017), as 2017 is when it was recorded.

Both of them are included in the Falsettos Playlist, which also has a bunch of much lower quality videos of student and other productions as well as a discussion of the show featuring Finn, Lapine, and Stephanie Block that is somewhat marred by poor sound quality.

If you have the opportunity to see a production live in the theater, that’s the best way to see this show, especially if it’s in a smallish venue.

Otherwise, I’m embedding a version below, and I highly recommend viewing one version or the other of the 2016 Broadway revival, either here or by following one of those links to YouTube.

I’ve done all I can. If I haven’t convinced you to give it a chance, what more can I say?