“Falsettos” was a seminal piece for theater-loving persons of my generation. First seen on Broadway in 1992, William Finn and James Lapine’s musical came with a score that Stephen Sondheim would have been proud to have written. Only it was cuddlier. And, more importantly, it was the first such major musical to look at gays and lesbians not as stereotypes or people in constant crisis but as ordinarily neurotic New Yorkers muddling their way through one day at a time and struggling, as so many of us do, to meld awkwardly blended families and relationships that change in ways for which we cannot plan.
I adored the piece when it first came out, especially its gorgeous love songs like “What More Can I Say?,” an ode (“But when he sparkles, the earth begins to sway. What more can I say?”) to the sheer happiness that can flow from falling deeply in love. It’s inevitably a temporary feeling, of course, as was especially true in the era of AIDS, a crisis that eventually touches Marvin, Whizzer, Trina, Mendel, Jason and “the lesbians next door.” The point of “Falsettos,” a reworking of two one-act musicals called “March of the Falsettos” and “Falsettoland,” is that love is an existential need and our best, indeed our only, weapon against the suffering that is part of all human life.
Court Theatre, which is producing “Falsettos” in concert with TimeLine Theatre, has an unpretentious but thoroughly gorgeous new production of this work, directed by Nick Bowling. I think it’s better than the 2016 Broadway revival because it is less mannered and far more deeply felt.
You’d have to be roughly my age to have a similar experience, but I relived every moment of how I felt about this show in the early 1990s, only now with what passes for the wisdom of experience. It’s not the first time that has happened to me at the theater, of course, but not with such intensity. Finn and Lapine created such a domestically intense show, such a dissection of a marriage under stress, and they never let their characters off the hook.
“Falsettos” centers on Jewish characters on what one might assume is the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Finn was also a master of crisp form and was by no means a composer who just dispensed soppy ballads; I recall visiting his Upper West Side apartment once to interview him for a story and finding precisely the clutter I expected from a composer whose artistic works are both chaotic and perfectly precise at the same time. Finn was once called “the poet laureate of loss” and that’s pretty much on the money.
Stephen Schellhardt, who plays Marvin, is a highly experienced actor who has known some troubles in his life and yet who often has been stuck with colorful comic types like Willy Wonka. I prefer to see him really dive into characters that allow him to do so; his superb work here builds on what he did with the father Bruce in “Fun Home” in Aurora in 2022, only he is even better in “Falsettos,” relishing the joy and pain within this show. I was similarly impressed with Jack Ball; Whizzer is a tough assignment, being a self-described superficial game player in Act 1 only to be transformed in Act 2 into a terminally ill man who is so empathetic toward his grieving lover that he worries about him being scared. Most actors can only do one or the other well; Ball does both.
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Sarah Bockel has the job of playing a woman who is acted upon far more than she acts herself, but this performer works through that and makes her the moral compass of the show. Add in a knockout performance from the teen Charlie Long as Jason, a sweet take on Mendel from Jackson Evans (who gets better as he goes) and moving work from Sharriese Hamilton and Elizabeth Stenholt as those lesbians next door and you have a wonderful cast who excel musically with the score, under the music direction of Otto Vogel, with a little band hidden away high in a simple set credited to Arnel Sancianco and Lauren Nichols.
You’ll likely be struck anew by how much things have changed. Bockel’s Trina beautifully sings “I’m Breaking Down,” having what we would now call a mental health crisis and these characters never assert their needs in today’s identity-conscious language. They’re all struggling for a vocabulary that came only later, I think. But its absence actually brought them closer.
Either way, love is an imperative in the absence of any other glue in our existences, and so is the need to fight back the spite and resentment. You can hear all that writ large in another great song, “I Never Wanted to Love You.”
Right. Wanting is not the point. Never was.
This is a very special show, one of the best Chicago productions of the year; I hope it extends through the holidays, when people have more time to feel.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Falsettos” (4 stars)
When: Through Dec. 8
Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 mins.
Tickets: $58-$90 at 773-753-4472 and courttheatre.org
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