All tagged Marvin

"Holding to the the Ground" - My Heart Is Breaking

In the early 1990s, this country was in a suffocating fear of the AIDS epidemic, with treatments only beginning to show possibilities of success and certainly no signs of eradicating this plague on the horizon. Here we are twenty-plus years later and we still haven't found a cure, but have found ways to help people live much longer with the dread disease. It was composer/lyricist William Finn who first successfully captured the fear of the unknown surrounding AIDS and brought it to the musical stage. Finn's 1981 musical March of the Falsettos, a highly neurotic tale about a Jewish gay man named Marvin who tries to juggle his wife, his son, his lover, and his psychiatrist as he explores his own sexuality, set the stage for continuing the tale into the AIDS crisis with the 1990 musical Falsettoland. Picking up where March of the Falsettos left off, this sequel explored the devastation the family experienced when they found out Marvin's lover Whizzer is diagnosed with a mysterious illness that we can only assume is the dreaded AIDS. Though it is never specifically identified as such, all of the indications are there.