'Falsettos' garners stellar review

Author: Ben Salkowe

While Middlebury's Theatre department has made a name for itself putting on first-rate dramas and even the occasional comedy, musical theatre has long been largely absent from the College's performing arts scene. Director Doug Anderson, visiting assistant professor of Music, and an outstanding cast changed all that last weekend with a production of William Finn and James Lapine's "Falsettos" that blew away the musical's struggle to find a place at Middlebury. Competing with a cozy Christmas drama in Wright, the Falsettos played to full houses and showed that the musical can - and now does - have a place in the Center for the Arts (CFA).

The story is, as it bills itself, an emotional examination of life, love, sex and other "unscheduled events." "Falsettos" - by definition male voices singing in the female range - follows the changing nature of families in the 80s through the character of Marvin (Nicholas Cloutier '06), who leaves his wife Trista (Allison Corke '08) and son Jason (Angus Barstow) for his male lover Whizzer (Jake Nicholson '05). The show also includes Marvin's lesbian neighbors, Charlotte and Cordelia (Hillary Waite '05 and Shannon Gmyrek '06.5). When Nicholson's character becomes fatally ill with AIDS, the play reveals that even non-traditional families are bound by love.

In stark contrast to past student attempts to bring musicals to Campus, Anderson's production was polished and audibly beautiful - for anyone who looks down on musicals as high school art, the show was a shocking revelation. Each member of the seven-person cast contributed an amazing but distinct voice to the show, from Mendel, the family shrink played by Adam Beard '06, to the adolescent voice of young Jason, played by Barstow who is an eighth-grader from the Gailer School. The vocal climax of the piece, however, was a duet of Cloutier and Nicholson singing the show's tearjerking penultimate number, "What Would I Do?" The dynamic of Cloutier's rich bass under Nicholson's sweet tenor gave Finn's music a stirring energy and illustrated the powerful voice of music on subjects as weighty and complex as the themes of changing families and love in "Falsettos."

The three-person orchestra, directed by Assistant in Music Carol Christensen and starring Mark Barber '06 visibly on stage with his keyboard, supported the performers with a clean and subtle accompaniment that was simple and elegant, but never overpowering.

While the show was musically exceptional, the production's most musically successful numbers were also sometimes its weakest moments as theatre. Particularly in the first act of the production, Cloutier, Nicholson and Corke all seemed to have difficulty balancing the large-ness and cartoon-ish nature of their musical theatre characters with the genuinely real and sincere concerns and people in "Falsettos." Finn's show asks actors to walk a difficult balance of playing big and caricature-like musical characters, while remaining emotional and vulnerable people in a story - a balance few of the show's leads attained for very long. Cloutier as Marvin never seemed to be the big and overdone character we would have expected in a musical, but was also not quite a real person, as he seemed detached in the play's most emotional moments. In her own nervous breakdown ala show-stopping solo, Corke had similar troubles - never quite becoming the big and rash drama queen her part demanded, but on the other hand not coming across as a real person either.

By contrast, Beard and Barstow - both of whom arguably had more clearly defined characters to play - more successfully reconciled their sometimes silly and always funny characters with genuinely human motives and worries. In a childish but surprisingly moving song, "My Father's a Homo" Barstow captured both the exaggerated cartoon-ish adolescent he played and the honest worries of a teenager with a homosexual parent. Beard also balanced his character well, offering audiences both an off-the-wall psychiatrist treating a family and simultaneously courting one of its members, and an adult looking for happiness in life.

Short of picky acting criticism, the production left me floored with its creativity and talent. The designers demonstrated that good theatre does not need gaudy, overdone lights, sets or costumes. In a creative use of the CFA they constructed a simple panel of four revolving doors managed by the eerily Vanna White-esque stage manager Jessica Nichols '07 - if all else fails with her Middlebury education, there's a wheel of fortune with her name on it.

"Falsettos" gave the campus' performing arts scene a much-needed fresh performance. As a show, it offered audiences a beautiful look at a heavy issue. As an artistic creation it showed that theatre is at its best when it creatively tackles challenges. In his "director's notes" Anderson noted that "Today 42nd Street has been thoroughly sanitized, as has the current crop of Broadway musicals [...] so it's a good time to revisit the edgy and powerful "Falsettos." For me it's a keen reminder of the vast potential of the American musical."

For Middlebury, Anderson's production was a "keen reminder" of the vast potential of the College's performing artists.