Make Me a Song: The Music of William Finn

GOOD CHEER
The cast attends a ball game in a segment from Finn’s Falsettos.

Photograph: Carol Rosegg

William Finn is the Walt Whitman of show tunes: a stubbornly unique composer and lyricist whose vibrant, idiosyncratic voice—always personal but rarely merely so—finds potential for transcendence amid the haphazard zigs and zags of the everyday. “Goodness and warmth are as dramatic, in their way, as any Broadway play,” sings a married woman in “I Have Found,” one of the roughly three dozen Finn pieces that are sampled in the worthy revue Make Me a Song. Such sentiments might seem pat elsewhere, but nothing comes easily in Finnland, where happiness is an attainable but ever-slippery goal.

Conceived and directed by Rob Ruggiero and performed by a solid cast (on an unfortunately ugly set), Make Me a Song mostly comprises material that can be heard on the cast albums of Falsettos and A New Brain, as well as the previous Finn collections Elegies and Infinite Joy. But to listen to these songs on CD is to lose out on their juicy theatricality: the vaudeville-blues crankiness that Adam Heller cranks out of “Stupid Things I Won’t Do,” the flinty bitterness of Sandy Binion’s “All Fall Down,” the tender immediacy of the two gay couples singing “Unlikely Lovers.” Witty, wistful, jaunty, sad, neurotic and brave all at once: Such are the contradictory impulses that animate Finn’s work. He contains multitudes and, in his own offbeat way, he’s one of the musical-theater greats.

—Adam Feldman