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.
Some of the individual moments of this Lincoln Center production are fantastic - Block, who is so well cast here and doing the best work of her Broadway career, does everything you could ask with the show's great, reflective ballads. You are never entirely convinced that Borle and Rannells are deeply in love, partly because Rannells does not sufficiently communicate the confidence that comes from being desired, but both these charming actors have moments that delight. The show centers on men in its structure, but the women in this cast all are so strong that you sense a realignment from 25 years ago.
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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