July 17, 1998

'Falsettoland': It's Family That Matters, No Matter What Family

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By PETER MARKS

EW YORK -- At a time when nontraditional casting no longer seems so rare, or even so nontraditional, leave it to a little-known group called the National Asian-American Theater Company to find a way to make it novel again. The troupe has taken "Falsettoland," William Finn's lyrical paean to Jewish angst, with its aggressively Jewish New York sensibility and multiple references to gefilte fish, and recast it with Asian-American actors.

Does the gambit work?

Let's put it this way: You should be so talented.

The production, directed with a respectful delicacy by Alan Muraoka, is sung with such elan and technical accomplishment that the dissonant moments -- the cast members in yarmulkes and prayer shawls, for example -- are simply nullified by the winning ensemble. What one approaches nervously as a potentially embarrassing put-on is in reality a rather loving tribute to, among other things, the joy of being in a musical. Here are seven singing Asian actors who seem to be declaring to audiences and casting directors alike that they would like to be considered for parts in musicals other than "Miss Saigon" and "The King and I."

Given the effortless sophistication and compassion of Finn's score, and the actors' evident vocal gifts, who can blame them?

It's surprising how rapidly your mind adjusts for superficial incongruities when a work is approached with such purity of spirit. For the production at the Vineyard Theater, which grew out of a successful benefit performance in February, Muraoka and company have wisely chosen to play it straight. Only in a teasing prologue, in which one of the actors, Merv Maruyama, pretends to hypnotize the rest of the cast into assuming their less than ideally suited roles, does the director disarmingly acknowledge the show's risky conceit. And only a theatergoer in a black mood would begrudge them the opportunity.

"Falsettoland," a chamber musical Finn wrote as the sequel to his earlier work, "March of the Falsettos" -- the two were merged in 1992 to create the Broadway musical "Falsettos" -- returns at an advantageous moment. The composer is represented by Lincoln Center Theater's production of his newest musical, "A New Brain," which opened to mixed reviews and a sense of muddled intention. "Falsettoland," in contrast, is Finn at the top of his playfully twisted game. Both sardonic and sentimental, it shows off the range of his songwriting talent, from the nervous comic patter of "The Baseball Game" to the three-hanky schmaltz of "Unlikely Lovers."

The sung-through piece has an incontrovertibly Jewish pedigree: at the heart of the story of Marvin (Jason Ma) and his life and loves is the question of how, and whether, Jason (Kennedy Kanagawa), the son of Marvin and his ex-wife, Trina (Ann Harada), will celebrate his bar mitzvah. It is, of course, in Mr. Finn's send-ups of the ritualized neuroses of Jewish New Yorkers in the 1980's that Muraoka's cast has the most difficulty reinterpreting. Neither Ma nor Maruyama, who portrays Mendel, the Über-shrink, can quite manage to vibrate at his character's excessive energy level.

Nevertheless, Ma's elegant rendition of the lovely "What More Can I Say?," as uncluttered as the bare-bones set by Sarah Lambert, goes directly for the heartstrings; Maruyama has a jolly time with the jaunty "Everyone Hates His Parents," a duet with the tenderly affecting Kanagawa. Ms. Harada enjoys a full-throttle success with "Holding to the Ground," Trina's embrace of her unconventional family, which includes Marvin's lover,

Whizzer (Welly Yang). Christine Toy Johnson and Mimosa, as the lesbians living next door to Marvin, share a warm connection in "Something Bad Is Happening."

But it's Yang as the cocky, athletic Whizzer who delivers the most smashing performance. He's persuasive from start to finish as the boy toy who becomes a man in the arms of Marvin and the hospital bed he's confined to after developing AIDS. His angry anthem "You Gotta Die Sometime" is equal parts fire and frustration and further confirmation that Finn's ethnically specific work can in fact be a moving, multicultural experience.