Uneven 'Falsettos' sings high, but not sincerely

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH All singing, all crying - altogether a little too much

plays in two acts, common characters notwithstanding. While there are strong efforts all-around, it's, as they say, garbage in, garbage out.

The first half of Falsettos is basically five crazy people driving each other crazier. You have your easily typed but promising cast, the fine opening number's "five Jews in a room, bitching": Marvin (Ari Shapiro, DC '99), a man who ditches his family when he figures out he's gay; Trina (Jeanne Goodman, BR '99), his repressed ex; Jason (Greg Kenna, a local student), their loner, genius son; Whizzer (Vayu O'Donnell, DC '99), the hot young thing in Marvin's bed; and Mendel (Mike Gottlieb, TC '00), the group's ingratiating psychiatrist, who has vague designs on Trina.

"Bitch bitch bitch," they do. Everybody has issues to work out, and Mendel becomes the focal point of their neuroses. Trina's mad at Marvin for abandoning her, and Marvin misses his son and is jealous of Trina. The open stage setup allows Trina and Marvin to interject themselves into each others' head-shrinking sessions with generally witty results. Mendel pretends to help, but he's got too much of a vested interest. As Marvin tries to talk about his marital issues, Mendel is asking "Did she sleep in the nude?" And while, at first, Marvin and Whizzer are "too busy mounting [a display of our affection]" to realize they have nothing in common except sex, that relationship soon disintegrates.

Inevitably, things fall further and further apart. The only thing that brings the characters fully together is their concern for Jason. An otherwise unsentimental first act becomes mushy around the boy, whose rough edges are quickly shorn off as he ditches chess for girls.

The first act ends on a note of sad reality. The second act, however, is diametrically opposed. This becomes less surprising when you notice that it was written nine years after the first, with the help of James Lapine. Somehow, that span wrought a world of change in Finn. The characters lose all of the complexity and tension that drove them through the first act, and become types. "Homosexuals, women with children, short insomniacs, we're a teeny tiny band," they sing. Instead of the oppositions between nearly real people in the first act, the second act becomes--to put it rudely--gays and Jews singing, dancing, and crying in some perversely sentimental AIDS after-school special.

This may sound insensitive and crude of me, but Finn leaves open no other interpretation except those terms. For no apparent reason, he introduces two self-proclaimed "lesbians from next door," (Maria Christina-Oliveras, MC '01, and Sarah Pike, TD '99) whose characters remain undeveloped throughout and seem to exist only to counterbalance Marvin and Whizzer (who miraculously work out their problems at the beginning of Act 2, moving from troubled couplehood to loving martyrdom). Add to that the insulting conceit that Whizzer's shallow machismo is really just a facade, ready to disappear into his true, loving self once he approaches death; the ridiculousness of a doctor walking around in three-inch heels; and a destruction of the nuance and wit that characterized even the weakest moments of the first act. Jason, who had been the easiest, most sentimentalized character in the first half, somehow exits the play as a dark, moral brooder, while everybody else gushes about how much they love each other and how "everything will be alright."

The acting in Falsettos is excellent across the board, with an especially strong performance by the rubber-faced O'Donnell. Sometimes it's a bit over-expressive, which goes with the genre, but the singing more than makes up for any minor shortcomings. The cast's singing is uniformly great, with styles ranging from the speak-singing of Gottlieb to the full-on belting by Goodman. In fact, the singing only starts to grate towards the end of the (surprise) second act, when over-emoting destroys all subtlety. Then again, the bombast might come with the Broadway territory.

The design, however, doesn't have the same easy excuses. It is passable, and even lovely at the climatic moments, when the black doors flip to reveal skyscrapers, and a cityscape is projected onto a rear screen. However, it's usually just drab, a few pieces of wheeled furniture and a vague spotlight or two which doesn't add anything to the production. Neither does the music's vanilla arrangement, which piles the schlock on thick.

To be fair, everything looks and sounds better in the second act. However, nice choreography, brilliant singing, and a host of other formal niceties can't save Falsettos from the intrinsic flaws in its script. It's mawkish pap that just doesn't do justice to the serious themes it tries to pursue. AIDS awareness is not well-served by homogenized musical melodrama. In fact, it's not served at all.

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