First comes the piano, then the bed. In between, in Barrington Stage Company\u2019s revival of \u201cA New Brain,\u201d a dejected man named Gordon Schwinn plunks out the first halting notes of a song he\u2019s writing. It\u2019s about a frog, and he hates it.<\/p>\n
In this musical, with songs by William Finn and a book by him and James Lapine, the prominence of the piano and the bed is no accident; they are the poles of Schwinn\u2019s, or any artist\u2019s, existence. To write? To sleep? It\u2019s almost Hamletian.<\/p>\n
But add an endless stream of groany rhymes and a life-threatening crisis, and it becomes something distinctly Finnian: a musical both twittery and existential, with an annoying tickle and a profound smack.<\/p>\n
For \u201cA New Brain,\u201d first seen at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998, Finn shaped the givens of his idiosyncratic songwriting style and of the stroke that nearly killed him in 1992 into a show that somehow transcends both. If you could never mistake its silliness and sadness for anyone else\u2019s work, you could never miss, in its intimations of mortality, how it inevitably speaks to everyone. After all, we must all decide how to balance the bed and the piano, or our versions of them: the thing that is our destination and the thing we do on the way there.<\/p>\n
The ragged yet nevertheless powerful revival that opened on Sunday in Pittsfield, Mass., succeeds best with the darker side of that chiaroscuro. As played by Adam Chanler-Berat, Schwinn, like his rhyme-sake Finn, is a songwriter who probably doesn\u2019t need a near-death experience to confirm his morbidly anxious disposition. Being forced to write hideous ditties for a television character named Mr. Bungee (Andy Grotelueschen) is enough to stoke his neuroses.<\/p>\n
So when a previously undiagnosed arteriovenous malformation makes his brain \u201cexplode,\u201d landing him in the hospital to await a risky procedure, he is already primed for a despairing review of his life, love, family and art. Joining him in these semi-hallucinatory retrospections are his best friend and work colleague Rhoda (Dorcas Leung), who tries to eke songs out of him; his indulgent lover, Roger (Darrell Purcell Jr.), who\u2019s stuck on a sailboat; a homeless woman only tangentially related to the plot (Salome B. Smith); and various medical personnel including an absurdly alpha surgeon (Tally Sessions) who sometimes goes shirtless.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s his mother, Mimi, a passive-aggressive tornado of Oedipal attachment and regret. (She cleans her son\u2019s studio while he\u2019s in the hospital by throwing away all his books.) Mary Testa, who in the original production played the homeless woman, deploys a lifetime of stage know-how (and intimacy with Finn\u2019s style) to create a shattering portrait of manic optimism just barely outpacing fury at a world that has already cost her too much.<\/p>\n
In outline this might all seem grim, but in practice Finn\u2019s songs, even ones called \u201cCraniotomy\u201d and \u201cPoor, Unsuccessful and Fat,\u201d are almost always too bubbly or buoyant to sink. The homeless woman\u2019s big number, \u201cA Really Lousy Day in the Universe,\u201d is a barnburner for Smith despite its bleak message: that disaster is the normal state of affairs for most humans. \u201cAnytime,\u201d a ballad for Roger that was cut during rehearsals in 1998 has been restored; Purcell makes it a lush tear-jerker.<\/p>\n
How Finn turns emotional and lyrical indulgence into a kind of discipline, following no known rules of song construction yet scoring points anyway, is something I\u2019ve never understood. Bombarded by rhymes that favor sound over sense rather than the other way around \u2014 \u201cThackeray\u201d and \u201cwhackery,\u201d really? \u2014 I alternate between cringing at their illogic and tearing up over them.<\/p>\n
Part of the trick, as in Finn\u2019s \u201cFalsettos\u201d diptych and \u201cThe 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,\u201d is surely how many of them there are. (\u201cA New Brain,\u201d originally formatted as a revue, is almost entirely sung.) So if at times Joe Calarco\u2019s staging is as becalmed as Roger\u2019s sailboat, its physical life stunted and those revue roots showing, not to worry. A fair wind will turn up soon.<\/p>\n
The fair wind will often be vocal. That\u2019s evident not just in the unusually well-sung big solos but in the tricky ensemble numbers. (The music direction is by Vadim Feichtner; the superb original vocal arrangements by Jason Robert Brown and Ted Sperling.) \u201cGordo\u2019s Law of Genetics,\u201d a song led by the surgeon and a hospital chaplain, crystallizes Jewish fatalism (\u201cthe bad trait will always predominate\u201d) in wacky doo-wop style. And the finale, revising the opening frog song as a hymn to the human capacity for reawakening \u2014 \u201cI feel so much spring within me\u201d \u2014 is almost impossibly moving.<\/p>\n
That capacity for reawakening is particularly wanted now. News of the disastrous effects of the Covid pandemic on the theater keeps coming, with aftershocks that are often worse than the earthquake itself. Through some combination of careful husbandry and audience loyalty, Barrington Stage has kept steady, continuing to succeed with worthwhile productions of thoughtful plays and complex musicals.<\/p>\n
Not all its neighbors have been so fortunate. Indeed, this production, which runs through Sept. 10, is being presented in association with the Williamstown Theater Festival, 20 miles up Route 7; Williamstown, facing an existential crisis as serious as Schwinn\u2019s, needs all the help it can get. It\u2019s not beyond the brief of \u201cA New Brain\u201d to suggest that everyone\u2019s survival, especially in the arts, is ultimately linked to everyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Luckily, as this ultimately uplifting revival demonstrates, Gordo\u2019s law of genetics isn\u2019t always right. Sometimes the good trait predominates.<\/p>\n