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[0:10] Robert W. Schneider: Hi, I'm Robert W. Schneider, and welcome to Fifty Key Stage Musicals, the podcast, a companion piece to the Routledge Press publication, Fifty Key Stage Musicals, which is available for purchase by going to Routledge.com or clicking the link below in today's show description.

[0:26] Robert W. Schneider: Today's episode focuses on chapter 37, the 1992 production of Falsettos.

[0:33] Robert W. Schneider: And with us today is the author of that chapter, Professor Jack Leschner of Columbia University School of the Arts.

[0:40] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Leschner wrote the lyrics for the 2010 Off-Broadway musical The Kid.

[0:44] Robert W. Schneider: His producing credits in film and television include The Fog of War, Blue Valentine, The New Yorker Presents, and the pilot of Mad Men.

[0:52] Robert W. Schneider: As an executive at Miramax and Film Four, he was involved in the production and development of dozens of movies, including The Crying Game, Good Will Hunting, and The Full Monty.

[1:01] Robert W. Schneider: His book Can't Take My Eyes Off of You was published in 2000.

[1:04] Robert W. Schneider: And his picture book, Mary Had a Little Lamp, was published in 2008.

[1:08] Robert W. Schneider: Currently, Professor Leschner is chair of the graduate film program at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

[1:14] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Leschner, it is an honor to have you with us today.

[1:18] Jack Lechner: Thank you so much, Rob. I'm delighted to be doing this.

[1:20] Robert W. Schneider: So my first question for you is what makes Falsettos a key musical?

[1:27] Jack Lechner: There are so many factors, but I guess the main one that you guys focused on when you put it in the book and that I was happy to follow up on is the idea that while, as I write in the chapter, it wasn't the first gay musical, it wasn't the first AIDS musical, but it was the first musical to address the AIDS crisis that actually reached a broad audience.

[1:48] Jack Lechner: That went to Broadway, that won awards, that became part of the musical theater canon.

[1:56] Jack Lechner: And we ask this to all of our authors, and I'll ask you, you know, there were tons of shows that you could have chosen to write about, but there was something about Falsettos that made you want to codify it. Why did you choose Falsettos?

[2:10] Jack Lechner: It's one of my favorite shows. I went to Yale, which had a thriving theater scene, then and now. And I guess my senior year, I saw a student production of March of the Falsettos.

[2:26] Jack Lechner: The second half, Falsetto Land, didn't exist yet, much less the full-length Falsettos musical. I have to say, first of all, it was a damn good student production. I unfortunately don't have the program, don't know who directed it, don't know the names of any of the actors who I didn't know.

[2:44] Jack Lechner: But it's one of those few moments in a lifetime where you just get flattened by a work of art. I was flattened by it. I rushed out and got the CD. Well, it wasn't the CD. I got the album the next day and played it and played it. And then when the CD came out, and then when, of course, Falsetto Land came out, I just became obsessed with that material.

[3:13] Jack Lechner: Partly, I guess it's odd because I'm straight. So I wasn't, it wasn't the boldness of the gay content that flattened me. It was actually the boldness of the Jewish content. This is also an unusually Jewish musical for a story that is not like Fiddler on the Roof set in the old country. It's one of the few musicals about contemporary urban American Jews, which I happen to be.

[3:49] Jack Lechner: And so that was just, you know. There was something else, though, that is something that I write about in the chapter, and that really was sort of a fundamental moment in my understanding of narrative structure, which happens to be what I teach at Columbia, which is right at the top of the show after the opening number for Jews in the Room Bitching, Marvin the hero comes out, or the protagonist, he's not very heroic, comes out and sings so the situation's this, it's not hard to comprehend.

[4:25] Jack Lechner: I divorced my wife, I left my child, and I ran off with my friend, but I want a tight-knit family. And we know at once, this is impossible. We have a protagonist who wants something he cannot have, and that creates this just wonderful coiled spring of tension that drives the whole show.

[4:52] Jack Lechner: And it's something that I've come back to really in everything I've worked on since every stage piece, every movie is just trying to recapture that feeling of excitement and dread that I had at that moment watching March of the Falsettos, of realizing this cannot possibly go well.

[5:19] Robert W. Schneider: I love that. Let me ask you a question, going back, if I may, which is you said, you know, there are, this is also a Jewish musical, as well as a gay musical. Between Fiddler on the Roof and Falsettos, which we know are drastically different because one is old world, one is new world. What are some thematic elements, however, in terms of Judaic religion that you see that both Fiddler and Falsettos have, regardless of their time periods?

[5:47] Jack Lechner: Well, for one thing, Fiddler on the Roof, while it's set in the old country, it is written by contemporary urban Jewish Americans, and quite brilliant ones. I got to meet the composer Jerry Bach before he died, because the show you mentioned earlier that I wrote the lyrics for, The Kid, we were the proud recipients of the Jerry Bach Award, which was a lunch with Jerry Bach.

[6:11] Jack Lechner: Oh wow. And I'm glad that I actually had the chance to tell him how much his work meant to me. He could not have been more generous and more delightful. I have never gotten to meet the other two brilliant collaborators of Fiddler on the Roof, one of whom it's too late to meet, Joseph Stein, the book writer, but Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist, is still kicking and amazing.

[6:38] Jack Lechner: And I think I've never seen an interview with William Finn, the creator of Falsettos, in which he gives any credit to Sheldon Harnick as an influence, but I can't imagine it's not there. Again, because of the way Harnick is unabashedly Jewish in his work and talks about Jewish characters, but also just the sharpness of his wit. And the underlying humanism, which I think is true of both Fiddler on the Roof and Falsettos, the way that they are very forgiving shows of people who often do things that are hard to forgive.

[7:23] Robert W. Schneider: Now let's talk a little bit about the unconventional route that Falsettos took to get to the commercial Broadway theater. Can you tell us a little bit of the history of the Marvin trilogy and how this saga came to be?

[7:37] Jack Lechner: Sure. So William Finn, you know, brilliant composer lyricist, at first, I think in the 70s and early 80s was just writing, I think what he thought of as pop songs, even though he knew they had some, they really wouldn't fit on a top 40 chart, and they had this wild, rangy theatrical feeling to them.

[8:05] Jack Lechner: And eventually I think they all sort of coalesced into In Trousers, which opened off-Broadway in 1979 at Clairett's Horizons, and then there were various other versions of it over the years. One that opened in 1985 after March of the Falsettos. Anyway, In Trousers is the story of Marvin, who is very much based on William Finn, as I think he'd be the first to admit, a sort of smart, too smart for his own good, as his character Jason says about himself, hypersexual, hyper-intellectual, hyper-verbal, modern American Jew, who the conceit of In Trousers is that he is the only male character.

[9:05] Jack Lechner: The other three characters are his high school sweetheart, his teacher, Miss Goldberg, whom he adores and lusts after, and Trina, the woman who ultimately becomes his wife. In the course of the show, he falls in love with his friend Wizard Brown and discovers that he is at the very least bi and keeps going from there. But we don't meet Wizard, it's just Marvin and the three women. It's sort of kind of a musical, it's sort of kind of a review. The songs are very complete unto themselves, and they don't really make a story, but they're amazing.

[9:50] Jack Lechner: And I've never seen a production of In Trousers to my own chagrin, but I'm one of the many people who got the album, which was in fact designed by James Lapine, but we'll come back to that later. And then, you know, just wore out cassette after cassette of it, because it's just so listenable. And then he teamed up with Lapine, who had been the graphic designer for the In Trousers album, and who was already starting to make a name for himself as an off-Broadway director and playwright.

[11:00] Jack Lechner: I'm pretty sure March of the Falsettos was the first show Lapine worked on. If I'm not mistaken, the team at Playwrights Horizons, Andre Bishop and Ira Weitzman put them together. And I think the great contribution of Lapine, and they both talk about this in interviews, is structure, coming back to that word, which is what In Trousers utterly lacks. It's just Finn's wild imagination going off in all directions like fireworks. And what Lapine did in March of the Falsettos was contain those fireworks into a steady display of dazzling illumination.

[11:09] Jack Lechner: March of the Falsettos opens in 1981 at Playwrights Horizons and takes the off-Broadway world by storm. It is, you know, it is he indebted to Stephen Sondheim? Absolutely. He went to Williams College because Stephen Sondheim went to Williams College. But unlike a lot of people who try to imitate Sondheim, Finn never sounds like an imitator. He is his own weird beast, and people just recognize that this is, you know, some people had fallen in love with In Trousers, but with March of the Falsettos, I think a larger community realized, oh, this is a major American theater composer.

[11:59] Jack Lechner: And then that was 1981. That's just when the AIDS crisis is really starting to emerge in New York, and Finn, like so many creative people in New York, I think knew a lot of people who died, knew a lot of people who lost people. It swallowed up an entire generation in general, but also I think the one place it probably hit harder than anywhere except maybe fashion was musical theater. We lost an entire generation of brilliant musical theater artists and musical theater artists who never were.

[12:45] Jack Lechner: The list is very long one, tragically. So it took a while for Finn and Lapine to, I think, think about coming back to that material and those characters, but when they did, they had to bring AIDS into it because AIDS was the story of gay men in the 1980s. I don't know whether Finn was active in Act Up or Gibbons Health Crisis or any of the other groups. I should know that, but I don't.

[13:24] Robert W. Schneider: And how do you?

[13:26] Jack Lechner: I mean, one of the things that you bring up in your chapter, which is so interesting, is that Falsettos, March of the Falsettos, which is Act One of Falsettos, was written before anyone had even thought of the word AIDS, and just about every single work, gay work that comes after the AIDS crisis deals with AIDS and HIV infection in some way, shape, and most famously, as is the Normal Heart.

[13:35] Robert W. Schneider: Of course.

[14:04] Jack Lechner: What are some of the advantages of having March of the Falsettos being written at a time before AIDS enters the scene, as opposed to going backwards and writing March of the Falsettos, let's say in 1991, but setting it in 1981?

[14:24] Jack Lechner: Well, that's the extraordinary thing. And I think it's one of the extraordinary things about Falsettos as a work, which, if we haven't mentioned so far, Falsettos is actually a two-act musical. The first act is the former one-act musical, March of the Falsettos, and the second act is the one-act sequel, Falsetto Land, which followed that in 1990. They were then combined into a two-act show, Falsettos. And the wonderful horrible irony of March of the Falsettos is that nobody knows what's just around the bend.

[15:03] Jack Lechner: It's this last golden moment of gay life in New York before it gets hit by the plague. And when you see the show now, it's just even if you don't know what's gonna come, even if you don't know the show, you still feel the ache of what these characters don't know is about to hit them.

[15:34] Jack Lechner: Um then, of course, in act two, it does hit them. Uh Whizzer gets AIDS and dies of it. Um, and the power of the show weirdly comes from the fact, I think, that Finn did a little tweaking to March of the Falsettos, but it is more or less presented as it was. He actually takes one song from Trousers and puts it into March of the Falsettos, where it works a lot better, actually.

[16:02] Jack Lechner: Uh I'm breaking down Trina's song. But um it the it's a very unusual circumstance where the dramatic irony extends not only to the characters who don't know what's what we know, but to the authors who don't know what we know. Um Finn and Lapine didn't know what was coming, and then they preserved that work and then extended into a work where they do know what's coming and deal with it.

[16:31] Jack Lechner: And that combination, I just compare it in the chapter to a sucker punch, because I think part of the power of it is that you don't have any of the foreshadowing that you would have if it had been written later and set in the pre-AIDS era, which any good playwright would do. Uh and yet the lack of that foreshadowing is part of what makes it so powerful. They don't know what's coming, we don't know what's coming, and then it comes.

[17:04] Jack Lechner: And there's an integrity to that because it would have been very easy for them, obviously, to go back and pepper act one with little elements of foreshadowing. But you said, like you say, the sucker punch of not having any acknowledgement of the upcoming plague makes it even more powerful for the audience when we do get to that moment.

[17:23] Jack Lechner: Um one of the things I was so fascinated by about in you know, reading your chapter, which is I had always known that you know there was other gay musicals before Falsettos, um, or falsettos, I should say, and things like La Cage aux Folles, etc. But I had no idea of a musical entitled Dirty Dreams of a Clean Cut Kid, which I find absolutely fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about this particular production and why we don't talk about it as much as we do, say, Falsettos?

[17:38] Jack Lechner: Dirty Dreams of a Clean Cut Kid is a little show that played in San Francisco. It's part of a at that point, pretty long tradition of little gay shows, little gay musicals written for a gay audience, um that and shows which none of the creators ever expected to play to straight people.

[18:19] Jack Lechner: Uh, you know, these are shows that had no dreams of Broadway, had no dreams of tours, had no dreams of movie adaptations. Um they're they're of the moment, and as a result, they're kind of these perfect little time capsules, you know, shows like Boy Meets Boy, um, and Dirty Dreams of a Clean Cut Kid, which is the first musical to address the AIDS crisis.

[18:46] Jack Lechner: It's the early 80s, it's a bunch of guys in a clinic waiting to get their test results. Um it was never properly distributed. Uh it's just a it's a cassette that you could buy from the writers. Um, I've heard some of the songs, they're they're fine. Sure, you know, it's it it is it is not a you know, it's it's it's not one of my favorite musicals ever, but it's not bad.

[19:19] Jack Lechner: Um, and uh, you know, it gets definite props for being the first. But because it did not have the marketing or distribution behind it the same way as a Broadway show does, it just sort of goes under the radar, is that correct?

[19:35] Robert W. Schneider: Yeah, and also frankly, because it's not at that level. Of course, it's it's it's it ain't Falsettos.

[19:42] Jack Lechner: Of course. And I know that in your chapter you cite a fantastic source called Queer Music Heritage.com. And listeners will put a link to that in today's show description because I looked at that website and I learned absolutely so much about the history of queerness in musical theater from that website.

[20:00] Robert W. Schneider: So I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

[20:03] Jack Lechner: Yeah, it's just a beautifully curated website that any queer musical that has ever been is on this website. Now, the big queer musical prior to Falsettos in 1992 on Broadway, we would have to say is La Cage aux Folles, which in a lot of ways yes, moved the needle forward in terms of the fact it was the first same-sex couple as the protagonists in a musical comedy.

[20:31] Jack Lechner: But I know that one of the complaints about the from the gay community as well as some critics was it seems like a musical version of You Can't Take It with You. It really isn't about queerness, it's about an eccentric family meaning a conservative family. Um, but Falsettos is really, would you say the first adult gay musical?

[20:53] Jack Lechner: That's a good way to put it. It's I think it's funny. I mean, they're both shows written by gay men, although Lapine is straight, um, which actually is probably significant.

[21:08] Jack Lechner: Uh there is the feeling in La Cage, a show I really like and admire same that it is aimed primarily at a straight audience uh as the movie it's based on was as the Birdcage, the remake of that movie is. Um it is there's not a lot of inside material there's not a lot of uh it and there is a lot of what I think you know you could uncharitably call special pleading.

[21:08] Jack Lechner: Um you know, it is a plea for equality and you don't need to make a plea for equality to straight people. Uh excuse me to gay people you need to make a plea for equality to straight people. Um Falsettos has none of that.

[21:08] Jack Lechner: Uh Falsettos is just it about gay characters and straight characters. Um it's not a coming out show that was in Trousers. It's not a plea for equality in any way it's just about these characters' lives and that's what I think was radical about it at the time and still feels very bracing.

[21:08] Jack Lechner: Um and so yeah in that way when you say you know the first adult gay musical I think that's the quality it's the it's the first gay musical that wasn't either a coming out show or a plea for equality. Can you talk a little bit about gay representation in film and television in the early 1990s, especially for our listeners who might be too young to remember a world before Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Pose and Drag Race?

[22:54] Jack Lechner: I mean, again, I I've as a straight guy, I feel you know, a little unqualified to be doing this.

[23:01] Robert W. Schneider: As a gay guy, I say it's okay.

[23:03] Jack Lechner: Thank you very much. You you've given me permission.

[23:07] Jack Lechner: Um I also have a dog in this race, because as you mentioned in your introduction, I was an executive on the Crying Game, which was at the time taken as a groundbreaking movie featuring a trans character, uh and has since been vilified by some quarters as being part of a long string of movies that demonize a trans character, or that you know are seen as not giving a trans character their full humanity.

[23:51] Jack Lechner: It that's certainly not how we felt about it at the time. Um, and I have to say I was I had been feeling kind of bad about that, of course, ever since the retro criticism started on the movie. And then just the other day, in the New York Times, I read an interview with a trans performer in some recent show who talked about how the Crying Game was the first time she saw herself represented.

[24:23] Jack Lechner: And my heart grew three sizes.

[24:27] Robert W. Schneider: Oh, that's great.

[24:28] Jack Lechner: Um, but so you know, I it it's tricky because you know I'm I'm a creative person in the creative industry. So of course I have tons of gay friends and you know feel a responsibility to represent in my work.

[24:47] Jack Lechner: Um and I've also ended up you know writing the lyrics to a musical about a gay couple, The Kid, um which landed me in a very funny situation where I was invited to the first LGBT reunion at Yale, and I said to the organizers, there's just one problem here. I'm straight. And they said, Oh, you count as diversity.

[25:11] Jack Lechner: Um it was it was very civil of them. So going back to your original question, actually, which you could cut out.

[25:20] Robert W. Schneider: No, I think I think it's fascinating. It's gonna lead me to a second question, but please continue on.

[25:27] Jack Lechner: Sorry.

[25:28] Jack Lechner: No worries. So going back to your question, there was in fact a long string of depictions in the media of demonic gay characters, of broken gay characters, of gay characters who are always othered.

[25:49] Jack Lechner: Um, you know, the Silence of the Lambs being a notorious example, uh, you know, the buy characters in Basic Instinct. Um there you got a lot of gay killers, and then a lot of gay suicides, um, and a lot of sort of pathetic gay characters.

[26:13] Jack Lechner: Um, and then you had special pleading and pleas for equality. Um so this really did feel grown up and unique and fresh to just like plunk some characters down. Yep, gay, moving on.

[26:36] Robert W. Schneider: Got it. And you know, one of the things that you bring up, which I think is so interesting, which is retrograde criticism, which it seems that so many cultural artifacts from you know the last 30 years or so is now undergoing a retrograde scrutiny, as in, you know, what was once I'll you know, I'll give you a personal example from my end, you know, as a gay man, seeing something like Will and Grace was mammoth for my generation because we were seeing a leading gay character on television.

[27:07] Jack Lechner: We did not care that Eric McCormick was did not I was not a gay individual. Now there's that criticism for it, which is how dare you not have a gay person play a gay character.

[27:19] Robert W. Schneider: Do you think that Falsettos in any way, shape, or form might fall under some sort of retrograde criticism for the example of James Lapine is a straight person, or you know, why is it about AIDS? Gay people have more going on in their life than AIDS.

[27:37] Jack Lechner: I've never seen any criticism like that. It's probably out there if you dig for it.

[27:41] Jack Lechner: You know what's so funny? I've dug and I can't find it.

[27:45] Robert W. Schneider: Why do you think that there's an immunity for this show?

[27:50] Jack Lechner: I think probably because so much of it comes out of William Finn's own life and experience. You know, it's such a personal work.

[27:59] Jack Lechner: Um he is not exactly Marvin, and as the trilogy goes on, I think he is less Marvin, but there's so much of William Finn in Marvin. Um and Lapine is, you know, co-librettist and director, but I think he would be the first to say, and Finn would certainly be eager to say that Lapine is just acting as a you know a collaborator and spirit guide and facilitator for Finn.

[28:31] Jack Lechner: Um it's Finn's show.

[28:34] Robert W. Schneider: Yeah.

[28:35] Jack Lechner: And so that kind of knocks that problem out.

[28:40] Jack Lechner: Uh, but then beyond that, how could you not write a musical about the deals with AIDS in 1990? You know, um honestly, it's all the shows that are about contemporary life that didn't address AIDS that I think are probably more worthy of criticism.

[28:59] Robert W. Schneider: Ah, interest very interesting. One of the things that Falsettos does that's very unique in the overall scheme of musical theater is it's a musical that's actually taking place in the here and the now.

[29:13] Jack Lechner: Um most musicals, it seems takes place a couple of years earlier, sometimes you know, decades past. What sort of significance does that have in terms of trying to market this show to an audience?

[29:28] Jack Lechner: An audience that is every day watching the news and it's seeing people dying of AIDS, they're watching people all around them dying of AIDS. Why would you then spend 60 or 70 dollars to go see it in a theater?

[29:42] Jack Lechner: That was certainly the challenge that Fran and Barry Weissler, the producers of the Broadway show of Falsettos faced in 1993, um, where they've got this show that uh 1992, excuse me.

[30:00] Jack Lechner: Um, the show that exactly as you say, uh is confronting things that uh people don't necessarily want to be confronted with at what some people still think of as an escapist art form.

[30:13] Robert W. Schneider: You know, people want to go to the theater and be taken away, even if they're taken away to um you know the the non-contemporary settings of Oklahoma or uh The King and I or Carousel.

[30:25] Jack Lechner: Um, sorry, go on.

[30:30] Robert W. Schneider: No, please.

[30:30] Jack Lechner: Oh, I was gonna, I was gonna say, can you talk a little bit about the marketing strategy that the Weislers came up with to get butts in the seats for this particular show, which everyone I'm assuming thought, oh, it's another gay show.

[30:45] Jack Lechner: That there's that's if I'm not gay, I'm probably not gonna get this.

[30:48] Robert W. Schneider: That's exactly it.

[30:49] Jack Lechner: And they uh they started with a beautiful piece of Keith Haring artwork, which I'm looking at right now because it's the cover of the uh uh published uh script.

[30:59] Jack Lechner: And uh it's it's it's these Keith Haring figures uh you know, uh holding up a uh beating heart.

[31:09] Jack Lechner: And it's a wonderful image, but I think possibly because uh Keith Haring was uh you know himself and HIV positive uh gay artist.

[31:21] Jack Lechner: Uh I think they were worried that they were falling into that very trap.

[31:25] Jack Lechner: So they then shifted from that to a campaign that was almost exclusively the very kind of special pleading that isn't in the show.

[31:34] Jack Lechner: Um, interviews, man on the street interviews with straight people talking about how amazing the show was, uh, including you know, members of the clergy and uh um housewives and people who a straight audience in 1992 would not have expected to go to the show.

[31:55] Jack Lechner: And like you say in your chapter, it seems like you know, it almost sounds like the setup of a joke.

[32:00] Jack Lechner: It's a priest, a rabbi, and Miss America.

[32:04] Jack Lechner: That's you know, walk into a bar.

[32:06] Jack Lechner: But it's okay, so it's all done to say, hey, this is not a gay show, it's not an AIDS show, it's an everyone show.

[32:13] Robert W. Schneider: Yep, which kind of sort of worked.

[32:15] Jack Lechner: I mean, this is not one of the greater uh hits monetarily or in terms of uh um performances.

[32:23] Jack Lechner: Uh um, how many performances did it run?

[32:26] Robert W. Schneider: I don't have about 400, I believe.

[32:29] Jack Lechner: So not a flop.

[32:31] Jack Lechner: Almost 500.

[32:33] Jack Lechner: Um, but they they pulled it off.

[32:36] Jack Lechner: It ran uh it was uh it went a Tony.

[32:40] Jack Lechner: Uh it it was it undoubtedly had the kind of life that then led to stock an amateur and a long uh long tail, as they say.

[32:53] Robert W. Schneider: What are the what is the impact of something like Falsettos on the the forward history of musical theater after it?

[33:02] Jack Lechner: You certainly have more freedom, I think, uh that writers took for themselves in depicting different elements of gay life in musicals.

[33:14] Jack Lechner: Um if you think of a show like Taboo, uh, you have a little uh Boy George show, which uh uh I think certainly would have had a different life uh without Falsettos.

[33:26] Jack Lechner: I guess the clearest inheritor is a show by a straight writer, um, but with gay characters, Rent, um uh, you know, Jonathan Larson's extraordinary work, which has a lot of uh debt to uh Falsettos.

[33:44] Jack Lechner: I think uh Larson uh I he didn't live long enough to give an interview in which he would talk about William Finn, but I can't imagine he wasn't a William Finn fan.

[33:53] Jack Lechner: There's just too many uh Finn-esque moments in all through Rent.

[33:58] Jack Lechner: And uh just the way that both shows have gay characters, straight characters, um, no special pleading.

[34:08] Jack Lechner: Uh and of course, Rent takes place a few years later.

[34:13] Jack Lechner: So the AIDS crisis is now in a different stage.

[34:17] Jack Lechner: You've got uh characters taking AZT, uh, and uh you can see the beginnings of the idea that this might someday be a medically manageable disease, but it's still killing characters.

[34:34] Robert W. Schneider: And you know, speaking of medically manageable, a show like uh Falsettos, in which getting HIV at that time is a death sentence as opposed to now, where there is medication, where it is manageable, where it is treatable, is there still a place for Falsettos in the world of performance, or is it a show that we say it had its time, people might not relate to it anymore?

[34:56] Jack Lechner: Let's just put it on the shelf for historians to look at.

[35:01] Jack Lechner: Well, the recent Broadway revival uh with Christian Borle and Andrew Rannells, uh Stephanie J. Block, which uh I had some issues with, uh, but it's still fantastic to see the work being presented on Broadway.

[35:20] Jack Lechner: It did okay.

[35:22] Jack Lechner: Um again, not a huge blockbuster.

[35:28] Jack Lechner: And more personally, I took my daughter to it, who was a teenager, and she didn't go for it.

[35:37] Jack Lechner: I was so excited to share this work with her that meant so much to me.

[35:40] Jack Lechner: And I hate to say it, she did feel the way you're just describing, which is this feels like it's about another time and another place, and I don't see how it's relevant.

[35:51] Jack Lechner: It's um yeah, as someone for whom it was intensely relevant once, it still feels relevant to me.

[35:57] Jack Lechner: And I think the craft will always be relevant because it's just so brilliantly hilariously tragically written.

[36:06] Robert W. Schneider: Do you think that now that we are that generation has gone through their own pandemic that maybe there'll be more resonance with this?

[36:14] Jack Lechner: That's a really interesting point.

[36:15] Jack Lechner: I bet you're right.

[36:17] Jack Lechner: I I hadn't even thought of that, but uh I bet watching Falsettos after the pandemic that we've just been through, it's gonna feel very different and probably feel more relevant in some ways.

[36:31] Robert W. Schneider: For someone who uh is unfamiliar with Bill Finn's work, how would you describe the essence of a Bill Finn song?

[36:43] Jack Lechner: His songs, most of them are crazy quilts.

[36:46] Jack Lechner: They just are songs that you can't imagine two people could have written.

[36:56] Jack Lechner: Uh no composer would ever present a lyricist with music that stops and starts and does curly cues and somersaults.

[37:04] Jack Lechner: No lyricist could ever come up with a lyric first that would be that strangely, you know, uh stream of consciousness.

[37:14] Jack Lechner: Uh I don't know how he does it.

[37:17] Jack Lechner: Uh and I say this as a songwriter.

[37:19] Jack Lechner: I don't know how he does it.

[37:21] Jack Lechner: Um the I I've never seen him say this in an interview, but the other writer who his work reminds me of besides Sondheim is actually uh the singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, whose songs uh have the same kind of stop and start and tangent and somersault quality that Finn's have of just uh you never know what's gonna happen next.

[37:50] Jack Lechner: Uh you think you're in a groove and then suddenly it just goes off in another direction, and yet they don't feel like they're falling apart because he's got such wit and such craft and such melody.

[38:06] Robert W. Schneider: When you sit down to write a song, what influences of Bill Finn are you hearing in your head when you begin your lyric or book writing?

[38:19] Jack Lechner: It's the thing that I talked about earlier.

[38:21] Jack Lechner: It's that coiled spring.

[38:24] Jack Lechner: It's what I think of as the engine of what is the engine of the song.

[38:28] Jack Lechner: What is the inner conflict or uh unexpressed desire or um unattainable desire?

[38:39] Jack Lechner: What is the thing that makes this song travel from one point to another point?

[38:45] Jack Lechner: What is the thing that makes this song not just a simple statement?

[38:51] Jack Lechner: Um none of Finn's songs are simple statements, and they usually have this conflict built into them.

[39:02] Jack Lechner: Uh, someone is singing about something uh that they want while at the same time uh bringing about the opposite of that thing.

[39:12] Jack Lechner: You know, uh Marvin and Whizzer are singing about how much they love each other and how much they want to kill each other and are annoying each other in the course of the song.

[39:22] Jack Lechner: Um that quality I have to say is something that I always reach for in the song.

[39:28] Jack Lechner: Uh just that feeling of what is the motor of the song that won't just run out after the first verse.

[39:37] Robert W. Schneider: And my last question for you today is as a as a professor of film and one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious university where it comes for film, is could Falsettos be a movie?

[39:54] Jack Lechner: There was a uh television adaptation for Showtime, which I'm embarrassed to say I have never seen.

[40:00] Jack Lechner: Um I don't even know if it's available.

[40:03] Jack Lechner: Um I've thought about it.

[40:04] Jack Lechner: I thought about it a lot in the time since I was working on this chapter for this book.

[40:09] Jack Lechner: Um and I think it could be.

[40:14] Jack Lechner: It's such a theatrical work, and extremely theatrical works are often very difficult to adapt into satisfying movies.

[40:25] Jack Lechner: Um, I just saw the movie of Dear Evan Hansen, which I loved, but clearly uh already not everyone is loving it.

[40:34] Jack Lechner: Um I do think it is that intense theatricality that puts some people off.

[40:42] Robert W. Schneider: And is that something that when you're making a movie musical that you just need to embrace and say the audience that doesn't understand it just doesn't understand it?

[40:51] Jack Lechner: Or do you have to really change that idea and thinking to make it palatable to all audiences that are watching it in a movie theater?

[40:59] Jack Lechner: There are two different schools of thought about that.

[41:02] Jack Lechner: Um, I worked on the early development of the film of Chicago, uh, but I didn't work on the version that you've seen.

[41:09] Jack Lechner: Um, the version that I worked on, well, first it was a script by Larry Gelbart, but then um I worked quite a lot on a version that was going to be directed by Nick Hytner and uh had a screenplay by uh the late great Wendy Wasserstein.

[41:22] Jack Lechner: And that was very much just uh theatrical, here we are, people bursting into song version of Chicago, you know, as it might have been done by a really wised up uh Vincente Minnelli.

[41:36] Jack Lechner: And uh people didn't want to make that version.

[41:41] Jack Lechner: There was the feeling we can't just have characters bursting into song and dance.

[41:46] Jack Lechner: There's got to be some reason for it, some explanation for it, which is exactly what Rob Marshall came up with in the final film of Chicago, where the musical numbers are all happening in Roxy's mind.

[41:57] Jack Lechner: And that somehow seemed to take the curse off it for people who don't like musicals, which is one reason that Chicago is one of the few musicals to win the Best Picture and uh to reach an audience beyond the musical audience.

[42:10] Jack Lechner: Um, as a member of the musical audience, I understand that, but I kind of resent it uh because I love people bursting into song and dance.

[42:22] Jack Lechner: My favorite musical, besides uh Singin' in the Rain, which is everyone's favorite musical, um, is Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort, uh, in which people burst into song and dance often for no reason whatsoever, which is the best possible reason to break into song and dance.

[42:39] Robert W. Schneider: Do you think there's a one last question?

[42:42] Jack Lechner: I'm sorry.

[42:42] Jack Lechner: Do you think there's a cinematic equivalent to Bill Finn?

[42:46] Jack Lechner: Somebody whose voice is so unique the way Bill Finn is in musical theater, but an equivalent for cinema.

[42:54] Jack Lechner: You could make an argument for Wes Anderson, um, just in terms of that absolute commitment to his own eccentricities.

[43:06] Jack Lechner: Um, the way that you watch one frame of a Wes Anderson movie and you know you're watching a Wes Anderson movie, and similarly, you hear a couple notes of a Bill Finn song, and you know it's a Bill Finn song because nobody else would have put those notes together.

[43:21] Robert W. Schneider: I I love that analogy.

[43:23] Jack Lechner: I love that analogy.

[43:24] Jack Lechner: Now, if Wes Anderson and Bill Finn could collaborate on a movie musical, I would be there on opening night.

[43:29] Robert W. Schneider: We would all be there ready to go.

[43:31] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Lechner, thank you so much for joining us today.

[43:34] Robert W. Schneider: The chapter is absolutely fantastic.

[43:37] Robert W. Schneider: And as a as a gay man, I would like to just thank you for all the beautiful work that you put into it and taught me so much about my community that I had not been aware of before.

[43:45] Jack Lechner: Thank you so much, Rob.

[43:47] Jack Lechner: It's been a joy to be a part of this project.

[43:49] Robert W. Schneider: Aw, thank you.

[43:50] Robert W. Schneider: Friends, please make sure to purchase a copy of 50 Key Stage Musicals by visiting Routledge.com or by clicking in today's show description.

[43:57] Robert W. Schneider: If you want to learn more about Falsettos, please also review the links in the below description.

[44:01] Robert W. Schneider: I'm Robert W. Schneider, and thank you for listening to 50 Key Stage Musicals, the podcast.

[44:06] Robert W. Schneider: Bye-bye.

[44:14] Jack Lechner: I'm bitching, he's bitching, they're bitching, we're pitching, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, funny, funny, funny, funny, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch.

[44:26] Jack Lechner: What do they do for long?

[44:28] Jack Lechner: What do they do for long?

[44:31] Jack Lechner: What do they do for long?