Make Me a Song - Original Off-Broadway Cast Recording

It's not an easy thing to be a serious composer these days. In all genres—classical music, opera, musical comedy—everything seems to have been already done. You end up either an epigone or an irrelevant experimentalist, either way out of it.

Of course, if you are a genius, you may find a way. But how many geniuses are there? And could those few, those very few, at the top of the pyramid survive without a base? Which is why so many are doomed to less than hopeful persistence.

I feel for William Finn, who, despite his limitations, doesn't give up. And now Ghostlight Records has brought out a two-CD issue, Make Me a Song, the original-cast album of his so-entitled show seen first in Hartford in 2006 and briefly off-Broadway in 2007.

It was a very modest production, with four singers (Sandy Binion, D.B. Bonds, Adam Heller, and Sally Wilfert), one pianist (Darren R. Cohen) and one larger-than-life-size neon portrait head of Finn briefly overhanging the stage. There was some barely minimal scenery, more concert than stage show, and the musical numbers came from several produced or unproduced shows, and others written for special occasions (or just written).

A plurality was culled from the Falsettos musicals, Finn's one true claim to fame. Here, against a background of Judaism, homosexuality and AIDS, writing from experience and deep feeling, but also with humor, Finn produced something both timely and original. And though these songs work nicely here with piano, they are more impressive on the full-scale Falsettos original-cast recordings.

The rest of Make Me a Song—produced too early to comprise Finn's songs for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, pleasantly innocuous as they were—are an up-and-down affair, generally more effective when seen onstage in Rob Ruggiero's production, enhanced by the living presences of its dedicated performers.

[IMG:R]Lyrics are a major problem for Finn, tending to sound too labored or too slapdash. Quite often he mistakes mere autobiography, as in "Passover"—or imaginary autobiography, as in "I Went Fishing With My Dad"—as having universal interest. And rhyming seems to come hard, if at all. Take this, from "Hitchhiking Across America":

"Coming down the road,
Coming down the,
Hitchhiking across America
And then by God I saw you
Coming down the road.
Mmm . . ."

Or this (one of Finn's favorites) from "You're Even Better Than You Think You Are":

"When I started out writing musicals
Which I did while I was here at Williams College
And I would like to thank the community collectively
For being so nice to me
For the most part
OH…"

And what rhyming! My favorite is: "Make me a song boy,/ Try not to fancy up it./ I'm your puppet. . . ." What about the obvious echo in "Oh, you gotta have heart," hardly relieved by following it up with "and music."

Ah, yes, music, which in Finn's case is, for the most part, scarcely better than his lyrics. When it does not imitate Sondheim, it imitates, worse yet, Finn. Although this is not unusual, he does not do his own vocal arrangements but depends on sundry others for them. He goes in for endless repetition, often of tiresome scat, no help to the music, which, unfortunately or not, I cannot quote here.

Finally, there is the question of taste. Onstage, as amusingly interpreted by Adam Heller, Finn could get away with "Republicans," a song whose stanzas were interspersed as a running gag, and concerned consorting or cohabiting with hated members of the party. Thus we get:

"So we're in bed and I'm in him a Republican
And I'm trying hard to make the fellow burst,
To be in him and be screwing a Republican,
Is damn unappealing
But I can't help but feeling
That it's nice to have the roles reversed . . ."

I don't know which is worse: screwing a Republican or committing two errors in five words, "I can't help but feeling"? Or, for that matter, having to pay for a two-disc set where one disc might be more than enough.