"...touching...heartbreaking...full of infinite joy"

August 19, 2005 performance, reviewed by Pat Nichols

William Finn, the composer lyricist of the Tony award winning 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee which premiered at Barrington Stage Company last year, has come up with another winner, the touching, at times heartbreaking and at other times full of infinite joy, Elegies, A Song Cycle.

Finn mourned lost associates and family, good friends and others and he chose to memorialize them in sad and understanding ways, in narratives and songs that make them live again for the audience thanks to the small but well tuned cast of five.

Elegies opens with a backdrop of clouds against blue skies that will later feature the faces of the people who will be noted. A piano sits at the left. Play opens with the entire cast involved.

Then Romaine Fruge reminisces Mark who orchestrated an all male Thanksgiving, and as a lawyer worked for gay rights and for the disenfranchised. In a tender celebration and sad rendition of his memories of the man he knew and remembered for his generous bringing together of men who might have spent a lonely holiday, Fruge, makes Mark known to the audience.

Others memorialized in song and dance include his own Mother, who loved him simply as a son. One by one the cast illuminates qualities and memories of those who have passed on.

In one scene Sally Wilfert sings Passover, recounting the number of passovers she has been to including a mother’s and those of so many relatives and how it changes perception. She sings ``Memories change and I see the world through you.”

In a heartbreaking solo, Wilfret tries to console those left behind, as she sings “Anytime, I Am There” in flowers and in song, she is anywhere.

Earlier the two women, Sandy Binion and Sally Wilfert, act and sing the parts of an author and a reader who does not feel satisfied with the book. They argue and the author deals with the pain by killing herself.

Bradford William Anderson drags a doghouse on the stage and details the funny ways you hurt after losing a dog. . .or many dogs. He scrambles around, in and out of the dog house bringing pictures of his dogs out, hoping to bring them back.

He teams up with Romain Fruge and Andre Ward to fantasize a trip to Venice that only existed in their dreams, something offered but never accomplished. Nor ever forgotten.

The nostalgic memory of a neighborhood in Natick, MA years ago where families lived and died, moved in and out, where children grew up, features Binion and Anderson as they grow older in their memories.

The entire cast performs each piece of the whole, slipping in one memory then out to another gracefully, bringing a reality to scattered memories, different people. The singers give their all, Wilfert bringing home the tender plea to remember she is not gone but is everywhere still.

Ward, Fruge and Anderson extol Joe Papp the producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater in a riotous rendition of "Joe Papp, Joe Papp, Joe Papp!!!!"

At the very end the entire cast stand as silhouettes who could be anyone, anywhere, anonymous to us but important to someone, somewhere. Deborah Abramson, the barefoot pianist, complements the ebb and flow as she follows the course of the play.

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