Word: finne
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Composer William Finn brings rich emotions to Broadway...
...nearly 10 years he tried other stories. Nothing worked. The one musical he finished, Romance in Hard Times -- about a mystical pregnancy and a Depression soup kitchen -- ran briefly off-Broadway at Joseph Papp's Public Theater. Says Finn: "The show wasn't perfect, but parts were brilliant. The score was spectacular." The reviews were so bad that he was relieved he had jury duty after it opened: "I figured that if I were in the courthouse I wouldn't actually commit suicide...
...Finally Finn turned his attention back to Marvin and his world -- Whizzer, the former wife Trina and son Jason, and Trina's new husband Mendel, who had met her when he was Marvin's psychiatrist. Plus, of course, the lesbians, a doctor treating "frightened bachelors" at the outset of the AIDS epidemic and a chef who experiments in nouvelle kosher. Says Finn: "I realized that I was obsessed with these characters. I still am. I am not interested in writing about anyone else. Everything that moves and grips me in the theater can be told through these people. And they...
...time Finn resumed, picking up their lives two years on, the decade that had passed in real life had revealed the defining impact of AIDS. Moreover, it had deepened his skills. When Falsettoland debuted, it ranked as the first (and still the only) great musical of the '90s. Coupled with March of the Falsettos and material culled from In Trousers, it hits harder...
...there more to come in Marvin's life? Finn predicts yes -- and hopes that this time it emerges faster. "I probably won't refer to falsettos next time though," he says. "I used the term because it is for songs outside the normal range of the voice, and these were characters outside the normal range. There hadn't been musicals or many plays dealing with homosexuals in a noncampy way. Now, as our notion of families broadens, these characters are well within the range...