William Finn and James Lapine's groundbreaking, Tony Award-winning musical FALSETTOS comes back to Broadway this fall in an all new production from Lincoln Center Theater. Lapine returns to direct an extraordinary cast featuring Stephanie J. Block (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Tony nom.), Christian Borle (Something Rotten!, Tony Award), Andrew Rannells (The Book of Mormon, Tony nom), Anthony Rosenthal, Tracie Thoms, Brandon Uranowitz (An American in Paris, Tony nom.) and Betsy Wolfe.
FALSETTOS revolves around the life of a charming, intelligent, neurotic gay man named Marvin, his wife, lover, about-to-be-Bar-Mitzvahed son, their psychiatrist, and the lesbians next door. It's a hilarious and achingly poignant look at the infinite possibilities that make up a modern family... and a beautiful reminder that love can tell a million stories.
'It's about time, don't you think?' sings Marvin (Christian Borle) at the outset of the second act of Falsettos, and yes: It is. It's about time that William Finn and James Lapine's intimate, obstinate, heart-shattering 1992 musical has returned to Broadway, to poke us and amuse us and reduce us again to helpless tears. Few musicals have the range, idiosyncrasy and emotional punch of this profoundly unconventional and personal work. Directed by Lapine, the show's revival is very much about a specific Jewish family in the early 1980s, and while its story of a man who leaves his wife and child for a male lover may be less novel today, its larger truths continue to resonate. Seeing Falsettos now is like opening a time capsule and finding a mirror.
In fact, pretty much everything about Lincoln Center Theater's ideally cast Broadway revival, again directed by Lapine with as much humor as sensitivity, makes it pure pleasure. The musical is firmly knotted to its era, unfolding first in 1979, as New Yorker Marvin (Christian Borle) bails on his wife Trina (Stephanie J. Block) and son Jason (Anthony Rosenthal) to move in with his gay lover, Whizzer (Andrew Rannells); it then jumps forward to 1981, the dawn of the AIDS crisis, chronicling how this nontraditional family unit has expanded and then how it gets clobbered by the devastating reality of the time. But the characters are so fresh, the writing so emotionally insightful and the situations played with such feeling that Falsettos hasn't aged a day.
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