Over the course of June, which is Gay Pride Month, I have decided to go into detail exploring the legacy of the musical Falsettos. Seeing as I believe it to be the best LGBT musical ever written, it’s interesting to note that it took over a decade to get from its Off-Broadway origins to the Tony-winning run in the early1990s. In that time the very identity of the gay lifestyle had changed with ideas such as homosexuality being biological and the rise in The AIDS Crisis. It was a radical culture shift, and one that William Finn, intentionally or not, had been on the frontline for with his trio of musicals that evolved from a simple identity crisis narrative into something more fulfilling.
His debut, 1979‘s In Trousers, was the entry point into “The Marvin Trilogy,” which explored how Marvin had a sexual awakening despite being in a traditional marriage. It was a reflection of loneliness that was in line with shows like Company and A Chorus Line of the time, tearing apart the social dynamics to understand the conflicts of being gay and unaccepted.
The nicest way of putting it is that it was an ambitious subject for Finn’s first outing. Based on the recorded version, it was also very cheap and reflective of someone still figuring out how to orchestrate (it was mostly accompanied by piano). Lyrically it’s subversive and reflective in ways deserving of a place in this narrative. Finn definitely showed promise, but at the same time, this was a show that was in rough condition. Following the success of his follow-up, March of the Falsettos in 1981, In Trousers received a major rewrite, shuffling songs around to tell a more cohesive story.
Though that may be in part because of how time had shifted between these two shows. Not only had Finn become more adept at the musical form, but gay rights were shifting significantly. This would be truer of the third entry, Falsettoland, but here we got the logical conclusion to In Trousers. It was a story of Marvin with his family, experiencing one of the most confusing family dynamics since TV’s Soap.
The biggest benefit here is that we’re no longer just stuck in Marvin’s head. Sure we get to have a more detailed look into his relationship with family and boyfriend Whizzer Brown (promoted from an off-stage character), but every character here matters in their own exploration of self. Given Finn’s own Judaism, it’s important to note that this is just as much a sincere exploration of the Jewish culture’s tropes. Where In Trousers focused on Marvin’s specific neuroses (he sure had a lot of giddy seizures), here we get the problem with his wife Trina, his son Jason, psychiatrist Mendel, and of course Whizzer. Every relationship informs something different about each of them, and they all have specific insecurities.
I’m not entirely sure what brought Finn to make March of the Falsettos and return to this world. There were reviews for In Trousers that were critical of the show that made him contemplate leaving the theater entirely. There had to be something there that spoke to him about this subject matter…
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| Left to right: James Lapine and William Finn in 2018 |
Or, it could just be James Lapine.
Upon the release of Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim would say that he too contemplated leaving theater following bad reviews for Merrily We Roll Along. He had moved into doing work for film, but as he put it he then met Lapine and felt inspired to make theater again, thus creating his most personal work in his entire career. Lapine has collaborated with Sondheim on many occasions, and their partnership can arguably be attributed to one of Sondheim’s most fruitful periods.
That’s an easy way of looking at March of the Falsettos, which featured Lapine as a director in their first collaboration. He would move into the lyrics department for Falsettoland, but for here there was clearly a honing in on ideas, pulling out the drama from comedic songs like “My Father’s a Homo.” There’s so much that is clearly richer in the direction of this show compared to In Trousers, and it’s as much just the growth of an artist as it is finding a collaborator who provided great feedback.
Among the most apparent was in the naming of the show. Throughout various interviews, Finn has been credited with calling the show everything from The Pettiness of Misogyny to Four Jews in a Room Bitching. The latter would be the name of the opening song and actually describes the show perfectly. However, it was changed when Lapine would tell Finn that he would never direct a show with that name.
March of the Falsettos was settled on. Named after another song in the show, it felt significant because of what it represented. It comes from the line “are you man enough to march with the falsettos?” The style of this song in particular is more high pitched and surreal, reflecting something more feminine It was a commentary on the flamboyant nature of the male characters, who were all struggling with the ideal form of masculinity.
I wish that there was more information available about the original run of March of the Falsettos. At most, there is a famous New York Times review that declared Finn to be one of the most promising new talents in theater. Time would call Finn the son of Sondheim. The show performed a yearlong run and was considered a success that logically drew many to want to see what In Trousers was like. With cast members carrying over (such as Chip Zien), there was a group effort to expand the story. However, I cannot confirm nor deny how similar March of the Falsettos is to what Falsettos (where it served as Act I, almost verbatim) would be. With exception to local theater groups, it’s difficult to find any recorded performance of this show (yet somehow a 1985 version of In Trousers exists on YouTube).
With that said, this Off-Broadway one-act one-hour musical was enough of a hit to form a following, moving from the side stage to the main following positive feedback. It wasn’t substantial enough to transition properly to Broadway, yet it would help to make Finn more of an essential name in the theater community. His work was compared to Sondheim with its ability to mix wordplay with humor and drama, finding catharsis in perverse corners of the world.
It also features his most singular achievement: “Four Jews in a Room Bitching.” The opening song may feature an absurd amount of a choir singing:
Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitchFuddy, fuddy, fuddy, fuddy
But it’s all an endearing reflection of the angst and willingness to be bitching because the person next to you is bitching. So long as someone else has problems, we all may just go on about our own problems, hoping that somebody listens. Given that bitching in this context usually connotes obnoxiousness and ignoring the worthless subject, it makes it funnier and the fact that these men obsessed with their own masculinity do something regarded as feminine (and Jewish in a different context) makes it all the more perfectly subversive, let alone catchy.
Finn envisioned this as what happens after the “dream come true” that is marriage and happiness. As the end of In Trousers would suggest, it’s not always an accurate representation of life. If anything it only opens a new host of problems.
This is the family drama portion of the trilogy, serving as the foundation for which neither other third actually means much. The highlights include having a son who is more in love with a game of chess than making actual friends. The psychiatrist is making his wife happier than he has, and there are all sorts of dysfunction. Whizzer is more of a role model than Marvin is, and the only reason his wife puts up with their affair is because of her own secret one.
What this benefits from is an expansion of characters, where the show takes six minutes to perform a psych evaluation on his son, comically running through scenarios to a catchy melody as we get a clue as to how tragic his life is. When he complains that he’s not a normal kid, we tend to believe him because there is enough evidence to back it up. As the sole child actor in the show, he has to form his own moral compass when there is no clear path of honesty in the adult world. Considering that he’ll be on the precipice of a Bar Mitzvah by the sequel, there’s room to suggest that this he symbolizes the rise of a generation of men raised by gay fathers, themselves learning how to be normal.
By having these hosts of characters, the exploration of The Marvin Trilogy was able to explore identity and anxiety in more complicated ways. By getting outside of Marvin’s head and exploring how the characters around him see him, it allowed a more honest discussion about things that we couldn’t get from simply hearing Marvin sing to us about his deepest problems. As a result, the manipulative psychiatrist holds answers to his son, though he’ll need to come over for dinner to reveal the solution.
If there’s anything that can be held against March of the Falsettos, it’s that it follows the trend of In Trousers and is more a thematic musical than one with a fulfilling conclusion. We’re spending an hour getting to know these characters and get one of the most screwed-up love stories ever put on a stage. By the end, things become more about how Marvin has let his son down, unable to fully understand his plight because of how self-involved he was in his own affair with Whizzer (itself a dysfunctional relationship despite Whizzer being the most rational of the five). Meanwhile, his wife is quiet in her frustration that she can’t live a normal life either.
When listening to the songs on YouTube, I have seen March of the Falsettos described as “Why are you like this, Marvin?” and it’s an apt moniker. This is so fleshed out with its character study that it almost makes In Trousers obsolete – and not just because the music may be a bit simple comparatively. It helps that there's an amped-up orchestra (all of seven musicians). This was a more interesting reflection of a man who clearly wasn’t fulfilled by the family life and needed to be more honest with himself, even if that meant causing great confusion in his wake. Whereas In Trousers felt like a study of being gay in a more buttoned-up era of the late-70s, March of the Falsettos took more pride in its subject, and it definitely made a difference.
But what if this was the end of the road? What if Falsettoland never happened and suddenly we’re left with two wildly inconsistent shows? Would that work as its own form of Falsettos?
That may explain why In Trousers got a rework following this show’s success. With that said, Finn would be the first to tell you how much of that show was reflective of a newbie trying to make a good show. Even if you amplified the production and softened the edges, it’s doubtful that there would be value in combining these two shows together. It’s almost redundant and the quality in lyrical depth isn’t a satisfying mirror. While you could look at it as an evolution of self, it wasn’t enough to make a show worthy of transitioning to Broadway.
Having Lapine as a collaborator ended up being what Finn needed to take his skills to a higher level. Because they were able to bounce ideas off of each other, you can get a sense that the songwriting is stronger and more interesting, embracing humor in the sadness and allowing the queer themes to be more confident and less simple self-effacing codas. March of the Falsettos by itself is a worthwhile show whose only flaw is that it lacks a bigger purpose. What value does this story have besides, as they put it, four Jews in a room bitching?
If March of the Falsettos was Finn learning to become more complex in how he explored themes, then the final chapter of The Marvin Trilogy would bring a definitive conclusion to this narrative. It wasn’t just going to be a gay relationship that was normalized and allowed to be morally complex, it was going to have a bigger point, one that would be emotional and piercing, elevating Finn into his final stage of the underdog. We’re not at Falsettos just yet. We still have to deal with the final Off-Broadway chapter with Falsettoland, which may lack the fun of the previous two, but puts every characters’ struggle into a fulfilling final statement.
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