The Book of Rannells: Favorite Characters: Whizzer, Revisited (Falsettos)

So, with The Book of Rannells, I’ve been going chronologically, and we’ve come at last to Falsettos.  But the thing is, I already reviewed that show back when the filmed recording of it showed in cinemas, and after I got the cast recording and listened to it a million times (ultimately leading to starting The Book of Rannells in the first place,) I did a Favorite Characters post on Andrew Rannells’s Whizzer, along with Relationship Spotlights on Whizzer with both Marvin and Trina, and Whizzer is definite feature on my Top Five Songs posts for Act I and Act II.  I’ve already written about Falsettos, and Whizzer, a lot.

This begs the question, “What more can I say?” (see what I did there?)  And yet, I can’t not talk about this fantastic, Tony-nominated performance.  Not only it one of my favorites of Rannells’s, it’s also the role that, for me, made Rannells one of “my” actors and made me excited to see what else he’s done.  So we’re back, once again, with Whizzer (spoilers.)

First of all, I need a Book of Rannells summation for Falsettos, since none of my many posts on the show explicitly include one.  “Recommend?  In General – Yes.  I get that William Finn isn’t always the most accessible composer, but if you give the show a chance, it opens up in the most incredible way.  Watch the Live from Lincoln Center recording if you can, but if nothing else, listen to the cast recording.  Andrew Rannells – Absolutely.  Rannells is wonderful in this role, a sharp performance with powerhouse vocals.”

Speaking of that performance… Watching the recording again, I’m reminded anew of just how great Rannells is here.  Even though I’m sure I’ve listened to the score dozens of times and I find it very hard to get to “The Games I Play” or “You Gotta Die Sometime” and not instantly replay them, seeing him in the role elevates it to an entirely new level.  As I’ve said before, Whizzer is the family member we know the least about, the one who interacts least with characters beyond Marvin.  He spends a decent amount of time in the background, sitting outside the action, or not present at all.

All that said, Rannells does so much and gives us such insight into Whizzer at every turn.  It’s interesting to see how petty and manipulative he can be, turning up his nose at Marvin’s clothes or playing hard to get just because he feels like it.  When he pulls away from a kiss, when he sweet-talks Marvin into letting him win at chess, when he shruggingly insists he only cares about sex and money, these are the tools he uses in his Act I relationship-cum-power-struggle with Marvin.  Both men love each other deeply, but neither can admit it to the other.  Marvin condescends to Whizzer and calls him a pretty boy, and Whizzer pouts and brushes Marvin aside.  There’s this irritating, sort of childish tone he gets in his voice at times, making Marvin put up with him in order to be with him.  Maybe Whizzer can’t play chess, but he can strategize.  He cops this attitude because he knows he’s desirable enough to get away with it – or so he thinks.

When he needles a bit too far and Marvin breaks up with him, Whizzer is shaken.  I’ve said before that Whizzer uses indifference as a coping mechanism, pretending he doesn’t care to shield himself from hurt, and that’s a tactic he even tries to employ with himself.  But it doesn’t work.  Throughout “The Games I Play,” the lyrics get progressively more honest and vulnerable as the song goes on, but the expressions on Rannells’s face and the emotion in his voice gives the game away instantly.  We see this same truthfulness in little moments during his relationship with Marvin, usually in the reaction shots between his lines – here, though, it takes center stage.  Even as Whizzer refuses to apologize and tries to shrug it all off, it’s clear that he’s utterly heartbroken by what’s happened.

Act II gives us the same defense used in different ways, and its façade again crumbles during Whizzer’s solo.  “You Gotta Die Sometime” is wrenching to watch, the growing terror in Whizzer’s eyes and voice as he fails to convince himself that he can “go out without care.”  It’s a tremendously-affecting scene, hitting home all the harder for what came before it:  all those shots of Whizzer smiling when others are looking.  Before, he feigned apathy to protect his heart from the man he loved, but now, he feigns optimism to protect everyone he cares for.  As everybody bustles around his hospital room in “Days Like This” and Marvin, and later Charlotte and Cordelia, sit up with him in “Unlikely Lovers,” Whizzer is constantly pretending to have more hope than he feels, not wanting them to see how sick he really is.  He puts on a decently-convincing act as people tell him he’s “looking very good today,” but as soon as the camera is on him and only him, the exhaustion starts to peek through.

I can’t go without talking a little more about the singing.  After hearing him in The Book of Mormon, I concluded that Rannells had an excellent pop-Broadway type voice, well suited to more contemporary-sounding scores (I maintain that he has pretty much a perfect voice for a Disney prince.  Menken, Lopez, Miranda – any of them could write him a terrific Disney song.)  With this show, though, I started getting a hint of how versatile his voice really is, a fact that was thoroughly hammered home by the time I got to his Live from Lincoln Center concert.  William Finn’s score is a tricky one, but Rannells absolutely rises to the challenge.  His lyrics on the faster numbers are crystal clear, he injects so much character into his singing, and I enjoy hearing those notes he sings at the tops of the harmonies, making them sound effortless.  And on his showcase songs?  He commands that stage, and those songs tell every inch of Whizzer’s story while still sounding completely gorgeous.  I’m so glad Rannells had the opportunity to play this part, and I’m so glad Live from Lincoln Center filmed it so it could be preserved in its entirety.

Relationship Spotlight: Whizzer & Trina (Falsettos)

Another of the fascinating relationships in Falsettos.  This one is perhaps the most intriguing because, while it’s definitely there, the show itself contains next to nothing that features Whizzer and Trina actually interacting as characters.  And yet, through Marvin, their lives have become intrinsically linked, and even if we don’t often seem them overtly relating to one another, the show demonstrates their ties in other ways (spoilers.)

At the start of the show, Trina and Whizzer are in one another’s lives basically at Marvin’s behest.  While Marvin has divorced Trina and gotten together with Whizzer, he isn’t interested in fully letting Trina go, either, and he’s contrived his “tight-knit family” set-up wherein he, his boyfriend, his ex-wife, and his son all coexist and share meals together.  Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a scenario either Trina or Whizzer is comfortable with; Trina makes numerous mentions of her feelings about the unconventional situation, and although Whizzer isn’t nearly as demonstrative about his inner feelings, he struggles with Marvin’s need to go “off playing family charades.”  However, both are to their own extent under Marvin’s demanding thumb, and both uneasily go along with the arrangement until it breaks down through other means.

Trina in particular has reason to resent Whizzer.  After all, he’s the “other man” who broke up her marriage (never mind the fact that, since Marvin is gay, it wouldn’t have worked out with him and Trina anyway,) and after having had such an unsatisfying relationship with Marvin herself, it aggravates her to think of Whizzer making Marvin happy, and vice versa.  But despite what she freely admits are her best efforts, she can’t bring herself to take any of those feelings out on Whizzer.  Nearly every time she discusses her thoughts about Whizzer, it’s clear that she’s upset about the situation, not at him.  “As far as enemies go, / Whizzer is not so bad,” she observes in one song, later confessing that she wants to hate him but can’t, and when Whizzer gets sick in Act II, she wrestles with how to react to it.  Despite “trying not to care about this man who Marvin loves,” she realizes that Whizzer “shared [her] life.”

Through the forced relationship that Marvin engineers in Act I, yes, and through their shared parental/step-parental love for Jason, yes, but more than that.  Because of their mutual experience with Marvin, Whizzer and Trina have both felt the brunt of the ways Marvin takes out his issues and insecurities on those close to him.  Marvin’s messed-up notions of gender roles and need to maintain a traditional “provider husband”/“doting housewife” set-up in his relationship with Whizzer means that Whizzer has to deal with the same sort of crap that Trina did, expected to do the cooking, be pretty, and be ready to give Marvin whatever he wants.  Similarly, both are well-versed in Marvin’s mind games, how he lashes out at others in order to feel less insignificant.

Even though, as I said, we almost never see Trina and Whizzer exchanging lyrics as dialogue the way nearly every other character does, the show repeatedly highlights these parallels in their experiences with Marvin.  In “This Had Better Come to a Stop,” Trina reprises the same “I was supposed to make the dinner” melody that Marvin admonishes Whizzer with at the start of the song.  In the same song, and again later in Act I, Trina and Whizzer “team up” in a way against Marvin, both standing up for themselves in unison.  They don’t precisely act as a united front – in both instances, they don’t stand together but stand on opposite sides of Marvin – but their tactics/grievances are the same.  Whether it’s taunting Marvin with the prospect of other men they prefer to him or reflecting on Marvin put them through (“We had fights and games. / Marvin called us funny names”) and his confounding nature (“And he’s sweet / And he’s mean,”) they sing together.

While the other central relationships in this “triangle” – Marvin-Whizzer and Trina-Marvin – have their share of frustrations for how dysfunctional they can be, the Whizzer-Trina relationship can be frustrating for the potential that’s clearly in it but not fully realized.  It’s such an interesting dynamic, and I wish the show had a lot more of it.  In a way, I think Trina and Whizzer could find a great deal of comfort in commiserating with one another, if they’d allow themselves to do so.

Favorite Characters: Whizzer (Falsettos)

Even though Whizzer is very present throughout Falsettos and he/his relationships with other characters is integral to the plot, he’s definitely the character from the core five (I’m not counting Charlotte and Cordelia, who don’t appear until Act II) that we know the least about.  While Marvin, Trina, Jason, and Mendel all explain their problems and feelings to each other or the audience on a regular basis, we don’t get as much on Whizzer.  Still, he’s an interesting character whose incorporation into the other characters’ lives fuels a lot of the story (spoilers.)

Our clearest view into Whizzer is through the eyes of other characters.  We see how Trina and Jason react to Whizzer’s introduction into the family, Marvin’s “tight-knit” arrangement whereby they all fitfully coexist.  What I like about this is that, uneasy as Trina and Jason are about these matters, they don’t usually direct their frustrations about it toward Whizzer.  Trina admits, “I wanna hate him, but I really can’t,” and Jason seems to have a relatively good step-parent/step-child relationship with Whizzer, despite Jason’s complicated feelings about his dad being gay; Jason even keeps in touch with Whizzer early in Act II when he and Marvin are still broken up.

This shows that, whatever is going on within the family (or more accurately, however badly Marvin is mishandling the situation,) Whizzer himself isn’t a problem.  That’s a big deal and says a lot about him as a character.  Even though he’s the man Marvin “ran off with” and the most tangible reason for Marvin and Trina’s divorce – in a time and place where same-sex relationships were commonly considered much more “scandalous” than they are today – Jason still likes him and Trina concedes that he’s “not so bad.”

But of course, it’s with Marvin that we get our largest second-hand view into Whizzer.  It’s there that we get a general sense of who Whizzer is as a person.  In talking about Falsettos, I spend a lot of time on Marvin’s flaws, but Whizzer demonstrates his own prettily handily as well.  When he resents Marvin treating him like a frivolous pretty-boy, Whizzer responds by leaning into that notion harder, claiming to only care about sex and money.  In every fight, Whizzer’s go-to move is to make light of it, to be casually dismissive and make little digs about how much he doesn’t care.  He knows how attractive he is and can use that to get his way, and even though he loves Marvin, he often responds to whatever more vulnerable overtures Marvin makes by brushing them off.

This is a quality Whizzer uses as a defense mechanism, deflecting Marvin’s jibes so they can’t hurt him, and it’s a tactic he employs on himself as well.  Like I said, we mostly see Whizzer from other characters’ points of view, but there are two songs in the show that place Whizzer’s thoughts/feelings center stage, and both of them cement the idea of Whizzer using false bravado in an attempt to protect himself.  First, in “The Games I Play,” he looks at his break-up with Marvin and, over the course of the song, becomes gradually less and less detached.  He tries to keep things shallow, inconsequential, at arm’s length, nothing but “games” as he makes excuses and refuses to apologize, but he can’t keep it up.  By the middle of the song, he’s admitting that love is tough, and by the end, he confesses how much it hurts trying not to love Marvin, how he struggles with Marvin’s lingering ties with Trina, and how he needs Marvin despite not wanting to.

His song in Act II, “You Gotta Die Sometime,” is a similar failed attempt at detachment, this time about his AIDS diagnosis and impending death.  While Whizzer is a little more forthcoming here, demanding to know, “Why me of all men?” and lamenting the unfairness of life and death, he still tries to be cavalier about it.  “Screw the nerves - / I’ll be eating hors d’euorves,” he declares.  It’s not until the end that his palpable fear and anguish becomes apparent, as he repeats his “you gotta die sometime” mantra over and over in increasingly desperate attempts to convince himself he’s not terrified.  It’s wrenching to watch Whizzer’s feigned detachment fail him, to give into those feelings he’s been running from.  But as with “The Games I Play,” it’s so cathartic, too, that he’s finally able to drop that act with himself if not with others.

Relationship Spotlight: Marvin & Whizzer (Falsettos)

In Falsettos, every relationship in the Trina-Marvin-Whizzer triangle (not a love triangle exactly, but a triangle none the less) is fascinating to me.  Whizzer and Marvin provide all sorts of interesting material to dig into, a couple with tons of major problems that yet still offers enough of the good that you can hope they’re able to work it out.  As with many aspects of the show, the Act I and Act II sides of this relationship are practically night and day, meaning there’s plenty to explore (spoilers.)

“Combative” is the word that immediately comes to mind for Marvin and Whizzer in Act I.  So much of their relationship is somewhere between charged competitiveness and an all-out power struggle.  A good chunk of that is down to Marvin’s lingering adherence to stereotyped gender roles (despite the fact that he’s now in a same-sex relationship.)  Marvin struggles with who he is as a man, and he often manages that by forcing Whizzer to conform to a “submissive housewife” ideal, staying home and doing the cooking/housework while Marvin is the provider.

Obviously, this isn’t a role Whizzer is well-suited for, particularly the “submissive” part – he resents being told what to be, and that makes him act out to provoke Marvin.  Both men admit that “of all the lesser passions, / [they] like fighting most,” and fight they do, over everything.  Whizzer chafes under the narrow boxes Marvin tries to put him in, and when he asserts himself, Marvin takes it as a threat to his own sense of manhood (so much of this show is just Marvin learning to be okay with who he is.)  These battles extend from the major to the minor; when they break up in the second half of Act I, it’s literally over a chess game.  Marvin has this need to make Whizzer less to make himself more, and when Whizzer refuses to “be a patsy” for him, Marvin can’t take it.

Yeah, dysfunctional up the wazoo, clearly.  Whizzer and Marvin both hurt one another a lot – much of this is on Marvin and his issues, but Whizzer certainly isn’t one to take the high road – and when they break up, it’s a long time coming.  However, even amidst all the fights and mindgames and messed-up power dynamics, there’s also this core of what they could be together.  Each loves the other deeply, not quite knowing what he’ll do with himself when they part ways, but throughout Act I, they both play this game of chicken with their feelings.  Neither is willing to be the first one to bend and admit he needs the other, and so they both make themselves miserable by keeping the other at arm’s length, both insisting on waiting for the other to give in first.  As such, when they part, it breaks both of them.  More hurt, more heartbreak, which only makes them want to hurt each other more.

Despite the love beneath the damage, it’s the kind of relationship that I’d ordinarily be hard-pressed to root for.  I think that the time jump in the second act – skipping ahead two years – is really the only thing that gives these guys a chance.  It’s clear that Marvin in particular has grown and changed a lot in the interim, without which there’s no way they could make it work.  But they do.  When they see each other again at Jason’s baseball game, each is justifiably wary but still drawn to the other.  They’re also made painfully aware of how much they miss the other; it’s implied that Marvin hasn’t been with anyone since Whizzer, and it seems that Whizzer went back to his old habits of casual fun with no feelings attached.  Although each tries to warn himself away from the other, they find themselves circling one another again.

I’ll be honest here:  I really love the playful joy and depth of feeling in their Act II relationship, but I do think it feels a little unrealistic considering their issues in Act I.  Yes, they’ve both grown and changed, and when everything hits the fan, they have something to deal with that eclipses any of their former problems, but it feels like there are a few steps missed in between.  To an extent, it feels like most of Marvin and Whizzer’s thornier edges get shaved down in order to maximize the tragedy when Whizzer gets sick, and while I understand the impulse, they’re a lot less the extremely messy, engrossingly-complex characters they were in Act I, and I wish the show could have balanced the two sides a little better.

However, I understand the reasoning behind it.  When the second act of Falsettos was written, unlike its first, we were in the thick of the AIDS crisis, and there were a lot of people in the world who didn’t care about the fact that gay men were dying from a horrific disease.  Writing about gay characters with HIV was an inherently political act, and I get the need on a writer’s part to go above and beyond to make the audience recognize that character’s humanity, to feel sympathy for him and his partner when he dies.  The fight for representation has been long and is still on-going, and at different points in that fight, the tactics needed have been different – I understand that, and so I get why the characters are softened the way they are.

And really, like I said, I do love it.  I love that Whizzer and Marvin play racquetball together and are able to enjoy being competitive, playing and teasing each other but not acting like their (read:  Marvin’s) masculinity is at stake.  Given what he’s like in Act I, it’s amazing how unselfish Marvin is in his love for Whizzer as his health declines.  It’s visceral and heartbreaking, but Marvin is in it for the long haul, with no intention of bailing no matter how awful it gets.  And of course, most of all, there’s the exquisite “What More Can I Say?”, where Marvin tries to articulate his at-long-last understanding of love while Whizzer sleeps beside him.  Gorgeous.