Source: Time Out New York
Date: November 22, 2007
Byline: Adam Feldman

Make Me a Song: The Music of William Finn

William Finn is the Walt Whitman of show tunes: a stubbornly unique composer and lyricist whose vibrant, idiosyncratic voice — always personal but rarely merely so — finds potential for transcendence amid the haphazard zigs and zags of the everyday. "Goodness and warmth are as dramatic, in their way, as any Broadway play," sings a married woman in "I Have Found," one of the roughly three dozen Finn pieces that are sampled in the worthy revue Make Me a Song. Such sentiments might seem pat elsewhere, but nothing comes easily in Finnland, where happiness is an attainable but ever-slippery goal.

Conceived and directed by Rob Ruggiero and performed by a solid cast (on an unfortunately ugly set), Make Me a Song mostly comprises material that can be heard on the cast albums of Falsettos and A New Brain, as well as the previous Finn collections Elegies and Infinite Joy. But to listen to these songs on CD is to lose out on their juicy theatricality: the vaudeville-blues crankiness that Adam Heller cranks out of "Stupid Things I Won't Do," the flinty bitterness of Sandy Binion's "All Fall Down," the tender immediacy of the two gay couples singing "Unlikely Lovers." Witty, wistful, jaunty, sad, neurotic and brave all at once: Such are the contradictory impulses that animate Finn's work. He contains multitudes and, in his own offbeat way, he's one of the musical-theater greats.