By Dan Shaw William Finn’s 1992 Tony Award-winning musical Falsettos now at Tri Arts Sharon Playhouse (through July 20) begins in 1979 (Act I) and ends in 1981 (Act II). The first act was originally its own musical written before the AIDS crisis, and it tells a quintessential 1970s Manhattan story about Marvin (Kyle Barisich) who has a son, Jason (Tyler Attomari), with his wife, Trina (Leslie Henstock), but realizes he is attracted to men, especially to a hot guy named Whizzer (Donald Coggin). The opening number, “Four Jews in a Room Bitching," lets you know that this is an irreverent, humorous, hyper-articulate and painfully honest portrait of neurotic New Yorkers coping in the era of Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, when the Me Generation became Yuppies (who are lampooned in a scene set in the psychiatrist Mendel’s office). Act II is set in 1981 at the dawn of the AIDS crisis; it debuted as a stand-alone musical Off Broadway in 1990, and the two parts were put together as a single show on Broadway in 1992. The players are still neurotic — they are stressed about planning Jason’s bar mitzvah, and though Trina has remarried her ex-husband’s ex-psychiatrist, the former husband and wife are bound by joint custody and planning a big shindig for their son. There are two new characters introduced in the second act, “the lesbians from next door" — a nouvelle kosher cuisine caterer (a concept that seemed delightfully ridiculous 22 years ago but not anymore) and a physician who treats Whizzer and otherwise young, healthy men who are taking ill and dying very suddenly. “Something bad is happening," she sings. 'Bachelors arrive sick and frightened/They leave, weeks later, unenlightened."
As seen through the prism of today and the marriage equality movement, Falsettos seems more about the epic changes made in how we see same-sex couples than a period piece about the AIDS crisis. And that’s a mixed blessing. Falsettos is proof that “unconventional" families have become quotidian and that seeing two men on stage — even in the old-fashioned setting of the Sharon Playhouse barn-like theater — no longer seems risqué. And yet the play demands to be contextualized. When I saw the original Off Broadway production in 1991, it seemed a certainty that everyone in the theater had been touched personally by HIV/AIDS, which was still an unequivocal death sentence. One knew that many of the men in the audience were, in fact, dying. One left the theater on Christopher Street and could feel the ghosts on what had once been Manhattan’s prime block for cruising. One knew that the AIDS ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital was just a few blocks away. Falsettos was not an isolated story of a gay man dying in his lover’s arms surrounded by disbelieving friends; it was an everyday New York story that defined the era from 1981 to 1996, when effective drugs transformed HIV/AIDS into a livable condition. William Finn’s music and lyrics — clever, complex, hyper-energetic — remain a musical theater triumph and the score is given a rousing rendition by the small band at Sharon Playhouse. To my mind, the actor who best embodies the spirit of the original is Brenton Schraff, who plays Mendel, the psychiatrist — his powerful voice is matched by his convincing portrayal of a kvetching shrink. While every member of the cast has strong American Idol-worthy voices, they don’t always quite capture the quirky neuroses of early 1980s New Yorkers. The “lesbians from next door" smiled too much for my taste and did not seem suitably rattled by the horrors of their friend’s tragic death. It would have been useful for Sharon Playhouse to include an AIDS timeline with its program, so theatergoers would be reminded that tens of thousands of Whizzers died in the 1980s and 1990s. But, of course, Falsettos was not supposed to be a downer — it’s a musical comedy that was desperately needed in those dark days of the plague era. And it remains a powerful, unforgettable, timeless celebration of friendship and family in a time of sorrow. TriArts Sharon Playhouse49 Amenia Road, Route 343, Sharon, CT 860.364.7469
