Ask most theatergoers to name the first musical on Broadway to deal with HIV/AIDS in its plot, and they’ll probably guess Jonathan Larson’s 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner Rent. But the correct answer is Falsettos.
Created by composer-lyricist William Finn (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and director/playwright James Lapine (Into the Woods, Passion), Falsettos hit Broadway in 1992 as a daring and quirky New York chamber musical exploring topics like gay liberation, divorce, therapy, Jewish identity and the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis. But the roots of Falsettos actually stretches from 1979 to 1990 as a series of one-act musicals staged off-Broadway that each centered around a gay Jewish protagonist named Marvin.
Windy City audiences will get a chance to revisit this history-making musical thanks to a rare Chicago co-production by Court Theatre and TimeLine Theatre starting in November. It’s the first professional homegrown production of Falsettos since Porchlight Music Theatre staged it in 2005. TimeLine and Court will be presenting the authors’ revised 2016 Broadway revival version, which toured to Chicago’s James M. Nederlander Theatre back in 2019 (and was staged in a University of Chicago student production earlier this year). Windy City Times profiled the leads of the new production.
“Falsettos has always been something high on our list,” said TimeLine Associate Artistic Director Nick Bowling, who is having a Court Theatre homecoming.
At the start of Charles Newell’s tenure as artistic director for Court Theatre back in 1994, Bowling was also there working through multiple roles for three years as a dramaturg, casting director and associate artistic director. Bowling’s return to Court Theatre with Falsettos also captures both companies in a time of transition: Newell recently stepped down from his leadership position following Court Theatre receiving a 2022 Tony Award honor for Outstanding Regional Theatre, while TimeLine is presenting an itinerant season of three co-productions as construction continues on their new Uptown location at 5035 N. Broadway.
Bowling says Falsettos overlaps the missions of both companies. For TimeLine, there’s the historical cultural moments depicted in the musical. And Bowling adds that with Falsettos, Court Theatre is exploring “the classic gay canon” of theater literature that treats the gay protagonist “as a leading man who is incredibly flawed.” It’s a contrast to gay men typically being depicted as a token comic sidekick or traumatized victim in most mainstream media during the 1980s and ’90s.
Helping Bowling is dramaturg Deborah Blumenthal and her assistant Molly Sharfstein. They’re both curating plenty of historical research to assist the cast, crew and audiences to understand the inter-sectional queer, Jewish and family dynamics of Falsettos.
Blumenthal previously was the dramaturg for Court Theatre’s 2012 production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and some of her earlier academic work has centered around other stage works (like Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart) that were created in direct response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.
“These texts—written in their moment—are written kind of without a manual on how to perform them in the future (as history plays),” Blumenthal said. “There’s this dramatic irony that as time moves on, audiences know more and more than the characters do.”
This passage of time and growth of knowledge also extends to the long creative gestation of Falsettos. William Finn first unleashed Marvin at Playwrights Horizons in the eccentric 1979 one-act off-Broadway musical In Trousers, when the heterosexually married leading man comes to terms with his homosexuality.
A one-act sequel soon followed at the same venue in 1981 with March of the Falsettos, which shows the emotional collateral damage Marvin wreaks on his long-suffering wife, Trina, and brainy son, Jason, after he leaves them for a younger male lover named Whizzer. Add to the mix an ethically challenged psychiatrist named Mendel and you have a very neurotic mix of laughter and tears.
The fact that March of the Falsettos premiered just three months after The New York Times headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” appeared in July 1981 meant that the emerging HIV/AIDS epidemic didn’t factor into the musical. But almost a decade later, Finn and Lapine did bring HIV/AIDS into the characters’ world in the 1990 musical sequel Falsettoland.
The plot continues in 1981 as Marvin, Trina and Mendel spar over Jason’s bar mitzvah, while Whizzer eventually becomes ill with an undiagnosable disease. Finn and Lapine also add the new gentile characters of “the lesbians from next door.”
There’s plenty of humor involving Cordelia, who strives to cater Jason’s bar mitzvah, while her partner, the emergency room doctor Charlotte, sees plenty of drama on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS scourge.
“What I’ve tried to impress upon the actors is that all of the information (about HIV/AIDS) that is available to you now—and even the information that would have been available to the characters in, say, Angels in America—none of that exists,” said Blumenthal about the Falsettos characters. “They have so little information about what is going on that they don’t even know to be hopeful or to be afraid.”
Bowling is glad that Finn and Lapine saw the necessity of adding Charlotte and Cordelia. He points out that the lesbian community became a vital and caring ally to HIV-positive gay men amid so much willful ignorance and hostility largely coming from anti-gay Republican politicians and policy makers in the ‘80s.
“It’s not only a sequel, it feels more like it’s the other half of this show,” said Bowling about Falsettoland providing a much more satisfactory, if tragic, ending than March of the Falsettos on its own.
It was director/choreographer Graciela Daniele who first paired March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland together into one show in a critically acclaimed 1991 regional production at Hartford Stage. Lapine and Finn were then inspired to do the same the following year on Broadway with the renamed Falsettos. They also added one In Trousers song of exasperation for Trina called “I’m Breaking Down,” which was inserted into the first act that was re-set to 1979.
Both Lapine and Finn respectively won Tony Awards for Best Book of Musical and Best Original Score for Falsettos. The musical had a financially successful run on Broadway lasting over a year, gaining an extra box office boost in 1993 when star Mandy Patinkin took over as Marvin from the role’s creator, Michael Rupert.
With protease inhibitors becoming medically available for HIV-positive patients in 1996, AIDS became less of an automatic death sentence in the years since. But there still is no cure for HIV/AIDS despite several medical advances with preventative treatments like PrEP and PEP.
“The epidemic today has three key similarities compared to 1992: stigma and discrimination, a worldwide epidemic with global inequities and the continued fight for a cure,” said Dr. Cynthia Tucker, who is Senior Vice President of Community Partnerships & Special Projects for AIDS Foundation Chicago in a statement.
“Straight Black women are one of the largest groups of new HIV diagnoses because of the assumption of who is at risk,” said Rick Guasco, the Chicago-based editor-in-chief of the Test Positive Aware Network magazine Positively Aware. “Stigma also discourages people from getting tested to find out their status or getting onto PrEP.”
With this knowledge in hand, Bowling and Blumenthal said Court Theatre and TimeLine Theatre are carefully considering what kind of outreach programs might be tied to their co-production of Falsettos. So far, Blumenthal has written about a cast and crew educational encounter with Pulitzer-nominated author Rebecca Makkai, who explored the early years of HIV/AIDS in Chicago in her book The Great Believers. Plans are also afoot to meet with University of Chicago doctors who worked in Chicago’s first AIDS clinics.
Blumenthal and Bowling are also curious to see how this musical will play to audiences who have lived through the worst of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
“It brings me back to thinking when COVID first happened, there was this question of ‘What is this?’ and ‘Do we know how it is transmitted?’” Blumenthal said.
“People scrambling to figure out that to do and how to keep safe and how to keep others safe—I think that rings truest to Falsettos—but again for me the musical takes place in an era so early that they don’t know what questions to ask.”
Indeed, Blumenthal notes that “HIV/AIDS” is never actually mentioned in the text of Falsettos because “the term didn’t exist” at that moment when the musical takes place.
Bowling said that Finn and Lapine wrote what would become the second act of Falsettos at a time when many New York audiences of the 1990s would have been all too aware of the toll of the deadly virus and how AIDS decimated the bodies of those infected from the inside out.
“Today, maybe people need to either be reminded or be introduced to that notion,” Bowling said. “We’ll see how far we can go with it. It’s tough, and it is a musical.”
Court Theatre and TimeLine Theatre’s co-production of Falsettos begins previews Friday, Nov. 8, with a press opening at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 16, at 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Regular run performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday to Friday and 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Preview tickets are $42-$72 and $58-$95 during the regular run. Student, group and military discounts also available. Call 773-753-4472 or visit courttheatre.org or timelinetheatre.com.