Reviews Regional Published 15 September 2023

Review: A New Brain at Barrington Stage Company

Barrington Stage Company ⋄ 16 August-10 September

William Finn’s autobiographical musical is revived in the Berkshires in a fantastic production. Lane Williamson reviews.

Lane Williamson

“A New Brain” at Barrington Stage Company (Photo: Daniel Rader)

You have to hand it to William Finn. Some composers freeze their score after its New York premiere or when the cast album has been released. Scores then get ingrained in listeners’ ears, sometimes in their bones, and there’s value in maintaining what people love about your work. Finn, though, is constantly tinkering. At 71, he’s rethinking how best to convey the dramatic message each time his musicals are revived, even if that means rewriting or excising large swaths of the material. 

It’s sometimes a mixed bag. A Finn devotee since my early adolescence, those songs are part of the makeup of my adulthood and it can be jarring at first to hear his earworm jams with new lyrics or unexpected cuts. The 2016 Falsettos revival had some particularly clunky lyrical revisions and the edits made to the 2015 Encores! Off-Center revival of A New Brain were not, at first, easily digestible.

Now, in a production at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA, the director Joe Calarco and a perfectly cast ensemble have made this version of A New Brain feel exactly right. A longtime artistic home for Finn, Barrington Stage’s new Artistic Director Alan Paul asked Finn which of his shows they could produce for Paul’s inaugural season and Finn selected this off-Broadway musical from 1998. Clearly, he was not done thinking about it since the Encores! production. 

A New Brain is a lightly-fictionalized autobiographical musical based on Finn’s own experience with, and recovery from, an arteriovenous malformation. His counterpart, Gordon Schwinn (Adam Chanler-Berat), is a composer for a children’s television show, hosted by the “tyrannical” Mr. Bungee (Andy Grotelueschen), while he dreams of writing for Broadway. When he collapses mid-conversation with his friend/producer Rhoda (Dorcas Leung), he is taken to the emergency room at NYU, where he is diagnosed and treated by a self-obsessed doctor (Tally Sessions) and two nurses: one nice (Eliseo Román) and one smiley, but rude (Justine Horihata Rappaport). A minister (Demond Green) and a homeless woman (Salome B. Smith) inhabit the hospital’s hallways delivering unsolicited advice. His boyfriend, Roger (Darrell Purcell, Jr.), and mother, Mimi (Mary Testa), arrive to comfort him in his time of need. 

As far as I could determine, this iteration is using the same edits Finn made in 2015 (with one notable exception), but the production, as a whole, works so much better. Calarco takes an approach indebted to Bob Fosse’s film All That Jazz, in which a patient imagines his loved ones and the hospital staff in musical fantasia while he is undergoing a medical procedure. Calarco’s staging centers Gordon’s writing; Chanler-Berat is always scribbling in a notebook, often far upstage while the other characters are singing. He’s capturing them in the moment and metatextually playing them back to us with his score. By having Gordon engaged in the physical act of creating the show while we watch it, it ties every loose, zany thread together.

And the show does have some wildly flapping threads. Finn’s characters rarely leave things unsaid and can’t see why they should say anything succinctly. They’re loud, verbose, and incredibly funny, but, amidst what seems like chaos, there’s real compassion for Gordon’s ailing brain. Calarco allows the show to get frothed up into absurdity when it needs to, but he’s not afraid to suddenly wipe all that away and show the foundation of these relationships. 

That distillation of truth is related to the production’s one big misfire, though. When Roger arrives from his sailboat, hours after Gordon has been in the hospital, they share a duet, “Just Go”, that perfectly encapsulates the dynamic of their relationship and arrives at a resolution where Gordon will, somewhat reluctantly, allow Roger to care for him. In this production, they have interpolated the song “Anytime” from Finn’s song cycle Elegies for Roger to further expound his feelings. The issue here is that, yes, the outward sentiment of “Anytime” is that someone will be around whenever you need them, but the lyrics say much more. In Elegies, the song is performed by a mother who knows she is dying of cancer, but wants her daughter to feel comforted that even if she is not physically present, she will always be around. “I’ll be there on the baseball field / Though I’m well concealed / I’ll be out there cheering,” Roger sings to Gordon in this staging. Does Gordon play baseball? The goal may have been for Roger to indicate that even when he’s sailing and unaware of what Gordon is experiencing, he’s still with him, but I’m not convinced that the sentiments of a cancer-stricken mother and a boyfriend at sea fully line up.

All around this, though, the production succeeds with full marks. Chanler-Berat is a treasure of the American stage and it’s always exciting to see him cook, especially in a musical. He’s such a sensitive, intelligent actor and he applies that craft to lyrics and melodies as well as dialogue. He gives Gordon a kind of cantankerous magnetism, a sort of get-away-from-me-no-I’m-joking-come-here complicated attitude that is softened by the gentleness in his eyes. Testa, who appeared in the original production as the Homeless Woman, is in excellent form (and voice) here, bringing a lighthearted humor to Gordon’s mother at first, but then showing us the unfathomable depths of her heart. 

A New Brain is an audacious piece of writing. With co-book writer James Lapine, Finn has structured a piece of theatre that tries to capture an unmooring of self, an out-of-body experience, with humor and pathos and some phenomenal tunes. Calarco’s production brings all of it together in a great big bear hug of a musical. 


Lane Williamson

Lane Williamson is co-editor of Exeunt and a contributing critic at The Stage. He is a member of the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle.

Review: A New Brain at Barrington Stage Company Show Info


Produced by Barrington Stage Company, in association with Williamstown Theatre Festival

Directed by Joe Calarco

Written by William Finn, James Lapine

Choreography by Chloe O. Davis

Scenic Design Paige Hathaway, COSTUME DESIGN: Debra Kim Sivigny

Lighting Design Jason Lyons

Sound Design Ken Travis

Cast includes Courtney Balan, Adam Chanler-Berat, Demond Green, Ross Griffin, Andy Grotelueschen, Dorcas Leung, Jamen Nanthakumar, Darrell Purcell, Jr., Justine Horchata Rappaport, Eliseo Román, Tally Sessions, Salome B. Smith, Mary Testa

Original Music William Finn

Link
Show Details & Tickets

Running Time 1hr 40min


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