Falsettos needs taming
After a decade of providing generally impeccable productions of offbeat musicals to Toronto, Acting Up Stage Company was entitled to a slip. But I don’t think anyone dreamed it would be as messy as their production of Falsettos is.
The company is in a new venue, but the overly wide, overly shoeboxy performing space at the Daniel Spectrum in Regent Park needs somebody better than director Robert McQueen and set designer Patrick Du Wors to tame it.
Falsettos was originally presented as two one-act musicals, March of the Falsettos in 1981 and Falsettoland in 1990. They were united as Falsettos in 1992 and had a successful Broadway run.
They tell the story of Marvin, who leaves his wife, Trina, and son, Jason, to have an affair with the very attractive, very gay Whizzer. Marvin’s psychiatrist, Mendel, winds up marrying Trina and all seems well.
But AIDS has begun its deadly path by Act II, and Whizzer succumbs. Finn’s writing throughout is punchy, witty and devoid of sentimentality. It’s a tribute to Finn that by the time some of Act II’s most potent material is unleashed, it triumphs over the production.
For a show that’s basically about five people, there’s no need for McQueen to have used the entire cavernous stage for his action.
People are always running from great distances, shouting at each other over hectares of space and failing to connect. They’re also usually seen in profile, because McQueen and his lighting designer, Kimberly Purtell, have lighted the show primarily from the side. It yields some striking images, but means people are always facing sideways and usually in shadow. And while the stage is empty in Act I, in Act II it’s suddenly filled with a shiny white platform that makes you swear Toller Cranston is about to appear, doing some 1970s ice dancing. Then there’s the way the cast has been directed. Stephen Patterson’s Marvin is all anger from start to near the finish. Trina, his wife, is played by Glynis Ranney as a Mitteleuropa neurotic spinster from the 1890s instead of the edgy Manhattan woman she is. Eric Morin, on the other hand, is the best Whizzer I’ve ever seen: bright, passionate, attractive and with a killer voice. But McQueen and company so miss the tone, the style and the punch of Act I, that it qualifies as a real disaster. Things picked up in Act II and the material is so strong it carries you forward. Falsettos is a wonderful musical. This production isn’t. You decide if the pleasures of the former are worth the pains of the latter.