I hadn’t expected to write another post, at least not a third one in a row about Falsettos, but I was still in the mood and last evening I watched the bootleg video of the 1992 production. Actually, it’s labelled 1993, so I guess the video was made in 1993, but as it is clearly Chip Zien as Mendel, I presume it’s the Broadway production, as the YouTube video, which is where I grabbed it, does not list the cast. It seems to be Michael Rupert as Marvin and Stephen Bogardus as Whizzer, and Heather MacRae as Charlotte, so I assume it’s Barbara Walsh as Trina, Jonathan Kaplan as Jason, and Carolee Carmello as Cordelia until someone tells me otherwise.
As bootleg videos go, it isn’t bad. Except the the audio is out of sync by half a second with the video. As I downloaded it, I was able to fix that easily enough before adding it to my Plex library, but given that the video is rather fuzzy, it’s probably not a major concern for someone watching it on YouTube. It’s one of the videos in the Falsettos playlist that I linked to yesterday.
Anyway, I enjoyed seeing James Lapine’s earlier staging again, and if I had my druthers, I’d combine some of the best aspects of his 1992 direction with his new ideas for the 2017 revival. In any case the casts of both productions are top notch.
But I wanted to say a few words about William Finn’s music and lyrics versus those of Stephen Sondheim’s. While I enjoy the work of both of those fine gentlemen, they are very different.
Sondheim was a craftsman, who took his time over every note, every chord, every word in every lyric and approached each song as a puzzle that needed to be solved.
Finn, on the other hand, often seems to reach for the first word or phrase or the first chord that enters his frenzied mind. His work often seems, well, sloppy.
For example, in the song, “Making a Home”, which has one of his loveliest melodies, he can’t find a rhyme for “home” so he rhymes it with “tone” and “phone”, I guess in the belief that no one will notice. Well, I notice. And it mars an otherwise fine song.
He does the same thing with his music, but it’s a bit more difficult for me, a non-professional, to try to explain what exactly is going on. But it sounds like he sometimes reaches a point where he doesn’t know where to go, so he just inserts a crazy key change and hopes that will suffice.
OK, the criticism is out of the way. Most of the time, his words and music are fine. And he’s great at telling a story and advancing it quickly in just a few words. Some of his songs really grab me and stay with me, even after 40 plus years.
And he’s capable of tricky rhymes that delineate character with the best of them, as this example from “I’m Breaking Down” shows:
I’ve rethought the fun we had,
And one fact does emerge:
I’ve played a foolish clown.
The almost-virgin who sings this dirge
Is on the verge of breaking down.
So no, William Finn isn’t Sondheim, and no, there’s no reason he has to be. He’s William Finn and he has his own distinctive voice, and most of the time, it’s a pretty good one.
