Stage:

...When the unbeatable Whizzer stumbles at racketball and then takes to his bed, the audience knows what is happening even if the characters do not...

...Since maturation plays customarily involve the death of a loved one, the musical's sad/happy ending has Jason bring his bar mitzvah to Whizzer's hospital room, at once a farewell, a beginning, and a testimony to the play's extended family...

...Despite the effectiveness of the last moment, Falsettoland is a very fragile show, carried less by what it gives the audience than by what the audience brings into the theater...

...It is all played against Loy Arcenas's childlike sets...

...Marvin and Whizzer have found each other again, and at first it looks as though the musical will be about two gay couples and their happy integration with a straight family...

...The only problem on the horizon is Jason's impending bar mitzvah, an occasion for Jewish jokes (there is-somewhat extraneously-a number about the ineptness of Jewish boys at baseball) and for parental attempts to be understanding and dictatorial at the same time...

...I missed the first two installments of William Finn's "Marvin Trilogy"-In Trousers (1978), March of the Falsettos (1980)-in which, presumably to chipper music (I am judging by the score of Falsettoland), the titular hero sorted out his confusion about his hetero- and his homosexuality...

...Ti Moune keeps him alive and then follows him to his mansion, becoming his mistress and completing his cure through her love...

...Once on This Island is essentially a folk tale, sung and danced by eleven performers who act as the storytellers and become characters when they are needed...

...The script begins to darken-or begins to mix dark elements in its sprightliness-when the doctor and her lover sing "Something bad is happening," in which an undefined disease has begun to make its dangerous presence visible...

...and lost Whizzer as well, leaving him alone to explore the possibility of a father-son relationship with Jason, who-as these things go in light fiction-had begun to adjust to his father's sexual orientation, to understand that homosexuality is neither inherited nor catching...

...Whizzer has become a kind of third father to Jason...

...The cast is a solid one-good voices, a great deal of energy-but they do seem to be working very hard to pump-up the material...

...Destiny arrives in the person of Armand, one of the ruling elite of the island, and through the device of an automobile wreck (another storm) that nearly kills him...

...All the characters from March are back in Falsettoland, and they have been joined by a lesbian couple-a doctor and a would-be caterer (an excuse for food jokes...

...Some of the performers-like the characters-have returned from the 1980 show...

...The music is as amiable as the story and the performers appealing, but the choreography by Graciela Daniele, who also directed, is as tedious as the dances she did for Dangerous Games...

...Heartbroken, Ti Moune wanders off, dies, and turns into a tree...

...I kept wishing they would stop the all-purpose undulation and let the simple story be simply told and sung...

...GERALD WEALES...

...When last we saw Marvin, as the radio soaps used to say, he had left his wife (Trina) and child (Jason) for his male lover (Whizzer...

...The production is supposed to suggest the simplicity of the folk genre, but it is too obviously working to fulfill that suggestion...

...All that was a decade ago, however, and in Falsettoland, Finn (with James Lapine again as coauthor) has to carry his cheerful celebration of gay-acceptance into the age of AIDS...

...In the long run, Erzulie, Goddess of Love, wins over Papa Ge, Demon of Death...

...Class differences triumph, however, and he marries a Paris-educated woman in his own set...

...Another small musical from Playwrights Horizon that has reached out to a larger audi-ence-on Broadway, this time-is Once on This Island by Stephen Flaherty (music) and Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics...

...Michael Rupert and Stephen Bogardus are once again Marvin and Whizzer, and Chip Zien repeated his role as Mendel, although Lonny Price, whom I saw, replaced him when the musical moved from Playwrights Horizon to the Lucille Lortel, the larger off-Broadway house where it is still running...

...The play is set in 1981-82, but Finn and Lapine and the audience are looking back on those years across a decade of deaths...

...At the end, the performers repeat "Falsettoland," the song that opened the show so joyously, but Mendel's final "Welcome to Falsettoland" is painfully ironic, the show's recognition of what the audience knows outside the theater and what the characters are just beginning to understand...

...had lost his psychiatrist (Mendel), who married Trina...

...The island is in the French Antilles, and the story being told there-based on Rosa Guy's novel, My Love, My Love-is of Ti Moune, a little girl who miraculously survives a storm and grows up thinking that she has been marked as special by the gods, with a destiny grander than the peasant village in which she has been raised by the couple who rescued her...

...Happy ending in story time: another Ti Moune and another Armand, of whatever name, meet at the tree and marry across class...