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Elegies: A Song Cycle

  • William Finn
  • Musical Revue / Cabaret, Drama, Contemporary
  • 3M, 2F
  • ISBN: 9780739040027

This intimate and moving remembrance of departed friends is by the Tony award-winning composer of Falsettos and A New Brain.

More information

Description

  • Musical Revue / Cabaret
  • Drama

  • Time Period: Contemporary
  • Orchestra Size: Piano Only

  • Performance Group:
  • Community Theatre, College Theatre / Student, Blackbox / Second Stage /Fringe Groups, High School/Secondary
Performed at Lincoln Center with a star-studded cast, this intimate and moving remembrance of departed friends is by the Tony award-winning composer of Falsettos and A New Brain. 

It pays tribute to a disparate group that includes impresario Joe Papp, actors Peggy Hewitt and Jack Eric Williams, a teacher, the Korean family who ran a deli frequented by Finn, relatives in New Jersey, friends, long-lost pets, and, in a moving sequence, Finn's mother. 

A three-song conclusion offers a tribute to the victims of 9/11. Each number captures poignant, often funny glimpses of life and death that sparkle with the narrative sophistication always apparent in Finn's work.

This musical evening is easy to produce, requiring only five good vocalists and a piano.

Songs Include:
Mister Choi and Madame G
Mark's All-Male Thanksgiving
Only One
Passover
Infinite Joy
Anytime (I Am There)
My Dogs
14 Dwight Ave., Natick, Massachusetts
When the Earth Stopped Turning
Saying My Goodbyes
REVIEWS:

"The loquacious ghosts who hover through the nearly two dozen songs that make up William Finn's moving and exuberant song suite, "Elegies," aren't the mournful twilit phantoms who haunt the typical popular song memorializing a loved one. These friends and colleagues of the composer's who have died over the last two decades are resurrected in playful lyrics bursting with internal rhymes that remember them in all their quirky vitality."

The New York Times

Premiere Production: Elegies was first presented at Lincoln Center's Newhouse Theater in March of 2003. Directed by Graciela Daniele, the cast starred Christian Borle, Betty Buckley, Carolee Carmello, Keith Byron Kirk, and Michael Rupert. The production was recorded nearly complete and released on compact disk by Fynsworth Alley (distributed through Varèse Sarabande.)

Characters

  • Casting: 3M, 2F

  • MARK THALEN - Male, Attorney and gay-rights advocate
    BILL SHERWOOD - Male, director/editor/screenwriter of the film Parting Glances
    JOSEPH PAPP - Male, producer and impresario
    PEGGY HEWITT - Female, character actress
    MISTY DEL GIORNO - Female, chiropractor
    JACK ERIC WILLIAMS - Male, composer and performer
    RICKY IAN GORDON - Male, composer
    QUENTIN CRISP - Male, raconteur/actor/writer
    MONICA ANDRESS - Female, a friend of the composer
    BOLEK GRECZYNSKI - Male, art therapist, creator the Living Museum at Creedmoor
    BARBARA FINN - Female, William Finn's mother

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