Betty Buckley, top, and Carolee Carmello perform in 'Elegies,' a Lincoln Center presentation of a song cycle by William Finn.
A Lincoln Center Theater presentation of a song cycle by William Finn. Directed by Graciela Daniele.
With: Christian Borle, Betty Buckley, Carolee Carmello, Keith Byron Kirk, Michael Rupert.
William Finn celebrates lost lives in this collection of songs being presented on dark nights at the Mitzi Newhouse only through Sunday. The evening is, as described, a series of elegies, but it isn't a dirge. Finn lightens the tone intermittently with overtly comic songs, and the best numbers are marked by a resistance to easy sentimentality; in looking back fondly, Finn doesn't airbrush out the flaws and eccentricities.
The cast is superb, their variously colored voices well-suited to the songs they're given. Betty Buckley, a naturally -- make that unstoppably -- emotional performer, remained dry-eyed for her first song, about a tough-minded English teacher, proud, lonely and bidding farewell to life, who is happy to have had just "one student who rarely watches television/one student who understands the value of precision."
The steely, darkening timbre in Buckley's powerful voice perfectly suited the personality being described. Later she and Christian Borle teamed for a duet about a dying mother and her son taking a final tour of the town they live in that brought out all of Buckley's transparent emotionalism. (The tears flowed freely.)
Michael Rupert, star of Finn's "Falsettos" on Broadway, sang several songs that were written in the composer's own voice. He's an ideal interpreter of Finn's music, well-versed in the composer's conversational style, in which long streams of words seem to glide comfortably along the gently bubbling crest of a melody.
Rupert brought a light air of wistful nostalgia to "Mark's All-Male Thanksgiving," in which Finn recalls a social culture decimated by AIDS. In "The Ballad of Jack Eric Williams (and other 3-named composers)," Finn recalls a prickly composer friend who never found the success he deserved: "As Eric Williams would constantly say/He wasn't the fashion of the day."
Keith Byron Kirk led the way on Finn's jazzy tribute to Joe Papp, a crowd-pleaser that nailed the impresario's famously hard-headed persona in a few stanzas: "Joe Papp never took crap/Even from Robert Moses./He saw a theater in Central Park/and Moses builds what Papp proposes." It was followed by a tribute to a less well-known legit name, actress Peggy Hewitt.
The rich, bright purity of Carolee Carmello's soprano is always a pleasure to hear. She performed one of the evening's more strenuously inspirational anthems, "Anytime (I Am There)," in which a dead (or dying) mother assures her children, "I am there each morning/I am there each fall./I am present without warning/And I'm watching it all."
Carmello also got to cut loose and display her antic comic gifts in a madcap-family song recalling a typical Passover. Like many of Finn's songs, it bumps boldly from lightly humorous to heart-tugging.
Borle was given a couple of Finn's exclusively comic songs, but his goofy, energetic manner couldn't really salvage the bewildering "Fred," featuring this peculiar stanza: "He was a moron./He made me laugh like the dickens./He had a steel plate in his head./A funny moron but he had a way with chickens." Right.
Maybe that's a little too specific, but, in general, it's the sense of detail that Finn brings to his writing that distinguishes it. When he reaches for larger things, banality has a way of setting in, and the sentiments begin to feel generic. This may be why the evening's final segment, devoted to the events of 9/11, did not come across successfully. The tragedy may be too large, and too recent, to be dealt with comfortably in the context of musical theater. But in any case, Finn's writing is at his freshest and best when he's closest to his material, and here you felt the distance.
The evening was staged with an informal simplicity by Graciela Daniele, with a few Persian rugs and chairs warming up -- slightly -- the set for Frank McGuinness' "Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme," another work with a sense of mourning at its core.
Music director, Vadim Feichtner; vocal arranger, Gihieh Lee; stage manager, Patty Lee. Opened March 24, 2003. Reviewed March 17. Running time: 1 HOUR, 20 MIN.
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Date in print: Tue., Mar. 25, 2003