The final scene of March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland at Hartford Stage, 1991 (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

When I speak about it with people who saw it, the phrase that comes up most often is, “It was life-changing.”

When I speak about it with people who have read about it, but didn’t see it, the question that inevitably arises is, “What was the ‘coup de theatre’?”

When I speak about it with people who knew nothing of it, they profess surprise that it existed.

I’m speaking of the Hartford Stage production of March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland, the first time the two shows were produced as a single evening. Directed and choreographed by the marvelous Graciela Daniele, the shows were playing exactly 25 years ago as I write this, in a 41 performance run in Hartford Stage’s 489 seat theatre in October and early November of 1991. At most, 20,049 people saw the production; it was at least a few hundred less because, to the best of my recollection, the previews weren’t sold out.

I was the theatre’s public relations director at the time, and it was one of the more ecstatic times in my career. From the moment that artistic director Mark Lamos informed us we would be doing the show, I was thrilled. Though I did not see the original March of the Falsettos in 1981, I played the vinyl cast recording (owned by one of my college roommates, in those pre-digital days) incessantly in my junior year (1982-83), almost as a nightly ritual. When Falsettoland debuted at Playwrights Horizons in 1990, I made sure not to miss it.

I have to credit Bill Finn and James Lapine’s musicals with helping to form my perception of gay life. I was a straight, cisgender kid from a Connecticut suburb in an era and area when one didn’t encounter adults who were out, let alone high school students. I don’t remember any particular fear of or enmity toward gay students on my part, and I hope my memory is correct, but I also don’t ever remember the topic coming up until I got to college.

The humor and sincerity of March, from the opening of “Four Jews in a Room Bitching” to the simple closing of “Father to Son” left me wanting to march along with Marvin and Whizzer and Jason (and Mendel and Trina and Cordelia and Dr. Charlotte) because love, as far as I was concerned, was love. I sang that message over and over in my off-campus room, embedding it in my everyday life as I came to know and love gay men and lesbians as my world expanded through theatre. I should probably give a small shout out as well to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which broke down barriers about sexuality and gender fluidity for straight suburban kids as much as anything we encountered in the late 70s.

It may be difficult to understand today, but producing a musical about a man who leaves his wife for another man, yet attempts to retain family ties, was still an edgy step outside of a major city in 1991. The politics of “outing,” naming someone as gay in the media even when they had not declared themselves to be so, was hotly debated. Gay-Straight Alliances hadn’t really reached northern Connecticut, only 120 miles from New York City, though AIDS certainly had: my first landlord in Hartford died from it in the late 80s.

In marketing the show, the direction I was given was not to confront the subject matter directly, but only to entice people enough to want to see it, and allow the story to reach them once they were in the door. It didn’t hurt that at the time, subscription tickets filled some 75% of the total seating capacity for the run. A lot of people were coming no matter what I did.

Because we had begun using marketing tag lines, aping film advertising, I cobbled together something to the effect of, “It’s about parents, children, love, sex, baseball and bar mitzvahs.” Our graphic imagery in ads was utterly abstract, saying nothing overt at all. Because this was in many ways an experiment, the show’s title remained the unwieldy March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland; the condensing came later.

I knew something special was going on when I would visit the rehearsal hall, whether to track down an actor for a program bio or to accompany a journalist who was doing an interview during a lunch break or at the end of the day. What struck me most was that whoever was in the room during a rehearsal was, as far as Graciela Daniele was concerned, part of the rehearsal. I remember her calling out questions to me as I sat on the sidelines; curious about bar mitzvahs, she became the only person to ever listen to the audio recording of my own bar mitzvah (including me). There were no barriers in Grazie’s space – only inclusion.

Once the show was in the theatre, audiences responded very favorably, with cheering and weeping. If there were letters of complaint over the subject matter, I either never knew of them or have long forgotten them. One staff member, while out to his friends and co-workers, was so moved after seeing a preview that he promptly came out to his family, as he proudly told us all. On matinee days, many of us would slip into the theatre at certain times for particularly memorable moments: we were often there together as Barbara Walsh, as Trina, nailed “I’m Breaking Down” in March; we were there for the final moments of Falsettoland, perpetually moved as Adam Heller, as Mendel, sang, “Lovers come and lovers go/lovers live and die fortissimo/this is where we take a stand.” We endlessly laughed over the anecdote told by Evan Pappas and Roger Bart, as Marvin and Whizzer, of a student matinee when the lights came up on the pair in bed and one student announced rather loudly, “Ooh, they’re gonna get some.”

The whole experience became heightened when Frank Rich, then the chief theatre critic of The New York Times, rendered his verdict.

“It was a secret, until now, that the two ‘Falsetto’ shows, fused together on a single bill, form a whole that is not only larger than the sum of its parts but is also more powerful than any other American musical of its day.

For this discovery, audiences owe a huge thanks to the Hartford Stage. Under the artistic direction of Mark Lamos, it has the guts to produce these thorny musicals together at a time when few nonprofit theaters are willing to risk aggravating dwindling recession audiences by offering works that put homosexual passions (among many other passions in the ‘Falsetto’ musicals’ case) at center stage.”

With unstinting praise, he went on to note:

“She [Daniele] has brought off an inspired, beautifully cast double bill that is true to its gay and Jewish characters — and to the spirit of the original James Lapine productions — even as it presents the evening’s densely interwoven familial and romantic relationships through perspectives that perhaps only a woman and a choreographer could provide.”

Of course, the box office exploded, selling out the remainder of the run within a day. House seats, which I instituted as a practice a Hartford Stage for the first time when I came to the theatre and were only rarely needed, were in high demand. And the talk began of Broadway.

That talk continued for several months, but without going into what were protracted and emotionally trying times, the Hartford production, as we all know, did not go to Broadway. It was Lapine’s original that returned to New York, with the core original cast members – except that Barbara Walsh, our Trina, joined that production. As a result, the Hartford Falsettos became the stuff of legend, and regional theatre legends tend to fade with time. But over lunch with Evan Pappas a few weeks ago, our first in quite some time, he noted that 25 years on, he still meets people who saw the show in Hartford, and tell him stories about how it changed their lives.

I suspect productions of March, of Falsettoland, of Falsettos, have been changing lives for a very long time, whether directed by James Lapine, Graciela Daniele, or any of the many other directors who have brought that story to the stage. I was privileged to have seen Grazie’s production as often as I wished; I’ve seen the previous Lapine productions several times and will see the new one in a couple of weeks.

I couldn’t be happier that it’s back on Broadway, though the show will always echo in my head with Grazie’s vision, with Evan, Barbara, Adam, Roger, Joanne Baum, Andrea Frierson and the twins who shared the role of Jason, Etan and Josh Ofrane. I only wish that Fun Home were still running, because how marvelous would it have been to have two stories on Broadway about family life, love, and pain, set in roughly the same era but written years apart, exploring the thrill of first love and the need for absolute acceptance of gay parents and children.

Oh, the “coup de theatre’? I haven’t forgotten. I saved it for the end, just as Grazie did, though I tipped my hand with the photo at the start of this essay.

The term, as applied to the Hartford production, comes from Frank Rich’s review. He wrote, “For her finale, Ms. Daniele exploits the spatial dimensions at her disposal with an overwhelming coup de theatre (not to be divulged here) that first reduces an audience to sobs and then raises it to its feet.”

After a quarter century, let me divulge.

March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland at Hartford Stage, 1991 (Photo by Jennifer W. Lester)

Grazie and set designer Ed Wittstein chose to completely open up the vast stage at Hartford to its walls, using no set pieces other than interchangeable cubes – and a bed. The lyrics were scrawled randomly on the entire floor (visible due to the theatre’s arena-like seating), and across the Broadway theatre-sized back wall. To be honest, in shades of black, grey and white, they largely disappeared, allowing audience members to concentrate wholly on the handful of people singing intimate stories, with no distraction.

But at the very end of the show, as Mendel intoned the final lines, a small square suddenly appeared through the drop that masked the rear wall. On it was simply the name: “Whizzer.” Then the drop was revealed to be a scrim as the entire back wall dissolved into a ghostly section of the AIDS quilt. A lever was tripped, rather loudly, and the front drop wafted slowly to the floor, fully and clearly revealing the quilt for just a moment before the lights went out, and the show ended.

While the quilt at Hartford Stage was not part of the real quilt, it replicated panels from that extraordinary expression of loss that once covered the National Mall in Washington. Because members of the company had been asked if they had family and friends who they had lost and wished to see included, audience members who worked in theatre quickly discovered they knew people on the Hartford quilt facsimile. While much of the audience was in tears, those who saw the names of those they loved and lost were often overcome.

Beautiful, sad, simple, funny and transcendent. That was the Hartford March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland. I have always understood and accepted that I am spending my life in a world that is forever fading into memory. But if I could ever go back in time to see just one more performance of any show I worked on, it would be March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland. At least it’s still playing in my head 25 years on, and once again, I’m in tears over its beauty as I write, and proud that I had a connection to it. I wish you’d seen it, and if you did, I suspect you know exactly how I feel.

Attendees at BroadwayCon (Photo by Howard Sherman)

If the sight of perhaps 750 theatre fans spontaneously breaking into a song from their favourite musical warms your heart, then the conference rooms of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue were the place to be on January 22. If the cast of that same musical, having heard about the impromptu singalong, asking some 3,000 theatre fans to sing to them is similarly inspiring, well you should have been in the Hilton ballroom that same afternoon.

From January 22 to 24, the Hilton was home to the first BroadwayCon, a fan convention for theatre buffs. Filled with events, performances and panels not just about Broadway, but about the theatre overall – though admittedly with a tilt towards musicals – BroadwayCon reportedly sold some 6,000 tickets, which had gone on sale 10 months earlier and cost $125 per day or $250 for the weekend.

I went to BroadwayCon with a mixed agenda: first, sheer curiosity, second, the intention to document it for this column, and third, because I had been invited to moderate a panel about production assistants who subsequently ‘made it big’ in the theatre business. I didn’t know quite what to expect, and one press representative I saw at the event confessed that when it was first announced, there was a feeling of uncertainty in their office.

On the eve of the event, The New York Times cited the demographics of the attendees, provided by the organisers: “Nearly 80% of the registrants are female; 75% are from outside the state of New York; and 50% are 30 or younger.” That’s a far cry from the general assumptions about theatre appealing to an increasingly older crowd, and while 6,000 fans certainly can’t sustain the field alone, the sight of multiple Elphabas, Phantoms, and Tracy Turnblads was evidence that theatre still holds a very strong appeal.

What was on offer? Among many options, there were cast conversations with leads from Fun Home, Spring Awakening, Hamilton and Fiddler on the Roof, and a reunion of cast members of Rent (just days before the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s passing and the show’s first Off-Broadway preview). There were fan meet-ups organised by affinity (a room that was packed by Sondheim fans at 10am was rather sparse by 11am, when the call was for Lloyd Webber buffs), conversations about diversity, design and marketing, as well as audience participation games and variety shows. Both singalongs I mentioned earlier were from Hamilton events.

I experienced a mild sense of deja vu throughout the weekend (I spent time at BroadwayCon on each of its three days) because it was 40 years ago, to the precise weekend, that I had attended my very first fan convention of any kind, the 1976 International Star Trek Convention, at the very same hotel. It is frankly remarkable that with the flourishing of fan conventions since that time, it was only this year that anyone managed to capitalise on the convention model for theatre and Broadway.

While there were occasional snafus with wrangling crowds into the largest and most popular events on Friday, a gigantic blizzard unfortunately prevented many fans – as well as guest speakers and performers – from reaching the hotel on Saturday, and even Sunday. But the organisers scrambled valiantly and effectively to insure a good experience for those who made it. So while the attendance never seemed as high as on that first day, and while the largest rooms may not have always been as filled, I sensed no lessening of enthusiasm among the die-hards who had either stayed over at the hotel or braved the elements to be there.

Like Broadway itself, access to BroadwayCon wasn’t cheap, and presumably there were countless fans who couldn’t attend because of the added expense of a flight and hotel tickets. But this first year should prove that there’s an enormous appetite among theatre fans to gather both with those they admire, and others who share their passions, getting out of social media and chat rooms and into real life interactions. As someone who began the weekend by adopting a slight distance and harbouring even a bit of cynicism, I was drawn back through heavy snow and puddles of icy slush because BroadwayCon successfully tapped into my inner fanboy, and because I was having a good time watching others have a good time. It gave them access to the world I’ve long been in. The theatre must do more of that.

WestEndCon, anyone?

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

The White House

There’s been a song running through my head for the past week, prompted by a series of press releases I’ve received. Anyone on a press list will tell you, notices from publicists flooding your inbox don’t normally move one to song.

The tune in question is “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” from Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. If you don’t know the song, it’s a cabaret number devised by the lead characters, spoofing the cultural array offered up by the Kennedy White House in the early 1960s. I’ve always been taken with the line, “We’ll have Bernstein play next on the Bechstein piano/And Auden read poems and stuff.” There’s lots of material like that.

The Sondheim wordplay is on my mind because there has been a steady drumbeat of cultural interest by the Obama White House in recent weeks, though not remotely for the first time. Without being political or trumpeting national pride, I have to say this makes me rather happy.

A number of Broadway shows were in Washington DC on Monday to tape Broadway at the White House for broadcast next week by TLC, one of our countless cable channels, on our Thanksgiving holiday. It features Michelle Obama as a special guest, with performances from several Broadway shows including On Your Feet, An American in Paris (in poignant timing), School of Rock and Fun Home. On Wednesday, the White House hosted a livestream salute to the Americans With Disabilities Act in its 25th year, which included a performance by the cast of Spring Awakening, which reached Broadway after being developed by the company Deaf West in a tiny theatre in Los Angeles.

This is all on top of New York City’s traffic-stopping special performance of the musical Hamilton two weeks ago, with the Obamas in attendance, in a high-price-ticket fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. The event was widely known about and seen thanks to news reports about the president’s onstage remarks. And it’s worth noting that this was the second time the Obamas, who have visited Broadway regularly throughout his terms, have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s look at early US history (although Miranda’s alternate was on the first time they went).

Sondheim’s ribbing of the Kennedys notwithstanding, it’s incredibly affirming for every theatre geek in the country to know that the form of culture we participate in and love finds favour in the highest corridors of power. To be sure, some might make the charge that theatre is an elitist art if they’re trying to tear down the politicians who attend, but TLC wisely made the taping of their show part of a daylong event for students from arts programs in public schools around the country. Who can argue with that? As for Spring Awakening, the stream was free for all to see.

Diehards like me cling to moments when theatre is recognised by the wider culture. I’m happy to tell you that in the 1950s, the sitcom I Love Lucy sent Lucy and Ricky to Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, while more recently South Park featured Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber in a brilliantly absurdist episode. There is symbolic power in politicians sitting in the dark watching the performing arts live, because it’s going to reach some portions of the population who might just decide to check this stuff out for themselves.

As Broadway is showcased before our political leaders and donors, it’s worth noting that even though some of the aforementioned shows originated with subsidised companies, there’s a vast array of theatre that isn’t defined by commercial success. Maybe before leaving office the Obamas might stop in at one or more of those companies. Or invite them to their home for the holidays.

This column originally appeared in The Stage newspaper in London.

“You know, if we all agreed to stop putting critics’ quotes in our ads, they’d lose their power over us, and we could just sell our shows on what we think is best about them.”

I will confess to having made that statement, or something along those lines, more than once when I was the public relations director at Hartford Stage. Thinking back on it now, I can attribute it to a) youth, b) feistiness and c) naïveté. Remember, of course, that this was the pre-internet era, when reviews didn’t linger forever online, but genuinely became inaccessible 24 hours after they appeared in print. And of course, there was no persuading absolutely every  other theatre in the area that this was viable, and without unanimity, it would fail.

No one took me terribly seriously (though at the time, I certainly did). At the same time that I was attempting to jumpstart my radical approach to arts marketing, I was also guilty of some exceptionally creative “Frankensteining” of words from reviews for the express purpose of trumpeting them in ads. Because that was what was expected, I freely engaged in hypocritical acts because, well…paycheck.

More than two decades later, it seems that Broadway marketers may be moving towards my way of thinking after all. As evidence, I give you three screen captures from video advertising for three current Broadway shows:

Finding Neverland ad on Times Square video screen

Screen grab of Curious Incident tv ad

Screen grab of Something Rotten! tv ad

Look, ma, no quotes! Apparently it’s now enough simply to plaster the logos of media outlets on an ad to suggest that their critics have been positively disposed towards the show being sold. I’d say the truth is more variable.

Without going back and rereading the coverage in every outlet represented in these images, I’m willing to give The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time the benefit of the doubt, because the reviews were, as I recall, pretty terrific, and because the show has given equal weight to each outlet it represents. There’s a certain understatement at work.

I give the Something Rotten! ad credit for some subtle humor, because while it offers up The New York Times logo, a bit of animation that lobs a tomato at it, and obscures it, because the Times wasn’t actually all that keen on the show.

The Finding Neverland logo parade seems fairly disingenuous, because its New York Times review wasn’t positive, yet it dominates to screen. Did the Times write about the show? It certainly did. Does the screen say that they liked the show? In point of fact no. But I suspect that they’re trading on the fact that the presence of the Times logo might fool some people into thinking the show was endorsed by the paper, which may not be an absolute ethical lapse, but it’s certainly willfully misleading.

This isn’t to say that quotes have disappeared from ads, and even the examples above pull out some specific quotes on their own, separate from these logo parades. In the case of Fun Home, their ad is almost entirely glowing and attributed review quotes, with some award nominations thrown in as well. What they’re avoiding is any mention of what the show is actually about, which is a shame, but a sign of our still unenlightened times, in which the content of the show may be perceived as possibly limiting its commercial appeal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlpNv60eGyU

I know of critics who will on occasion, when they think their writing has been inaccurately represented in ads, reach out to productions and make their feelings known. In such cases, especially with major critics, I would imagine those concerns receive due attention, since no one wants to be party to a souring relationship with a critic. But in these cases, the question is whether the folks who police trademark usage for each outlet have noticed these examples, and whether they are concerned enough to suggest – or enforce – that, in some cases, their logos may be getting used to imply an endorsement which doesn’t necessarily exist.

For those who decry the shrinking space for arts reviews, or who find star rating systems too reductive, it seems we’re in the process of moving on to the next iteration – exploring how to dispense with opinion entirely, in favor of implied endorsement, warranted or not. My youthful activism has come around to a more mature realism: we need as much writing as possible about the theatre, and that doesn’t mean just feature coverage, but criticism as well. If we work to marginalize critics through marketing, we may boost a show here or there, but at the end of the day we’ll be worse off for having done so.