'A New Brain' by 11th Hour

Between these two mega-hits came a relatively obscure musical that debuted at Lincoln Center but never got to Broadway or had a national tour. Yet I submit A New Brain is Finn’s masterpiece.

The 11th Hour Theatre took a chance and presented this show in three performances over one weekend. They minimized financial risk by booking the tiniest space at the multistage Adrienne Theatre and doing without sets. The composer attended the Sunday matinee of this autobiographical play.

In June of 1992, one week after Finn received his Tony Awards, he collapsed and was rushed to NYU Hospital, because it was feared that he had either a stroke or aneurysm. It turned out that the 40-year-old Finn had a malformed artery, leaking and ready to burst, in his brain. High-risk surgery was his only hope. Afterward he lay in a coma with his mother, lover, and friends at bedside. As Finn regained consciousness, he began writing songs about his experience. This evolved into a humorous exploration of crisis and recovery, and it reveals his biggest terror about possible death: fear that he’ll never be able to finish the music that’s inside him.

What might live on?

If all you know of Finn’s music is the lighthearted Spelling Bee, you owe it to yourself to become acquainted with A New Brain, which is much more emotional and complex. This show relates to people's lives even more than Falsettos, which depicted a gay man leaving his wife and son. A New Brain resonates for anyone who feels inadequate or unfulfilled (isn’t that all of us?) and those who have faced life-threatening illness. His protagonist regrets all the songs he never wrote, the stories he never found time to tell. He, like us, wonders what part of him — or what creation of his — might live on after death.

A New Brain’s music contains an unusually wide range of song genres: doo-wop, swing, pop love songs, and tango. Two ballads are especially beautiful: “I’d Rather Be Sailing (and then come home to you)” and “Music Still Plays On.” What’s more, there’s linkage between songs that appear early in the play and reappear later in transmuted form, matching the transformation that the composer says he personally underwent. Near the start of the play, the protagonist sings the hand-clapping, finger-snapping “you’ve got to have heart and music to make a song.” At the end he thankfully sings that he’s been given “time and music.”

What do people think?

While the tunes are easily accessible, the lyrics mystified some critics, who couldn’t understand why some characters sang negatively about the protagonist. I interpret this as the insecure songwriter’s subconscious idea of what he imagines to be his friends’ and coworkers’ feelings about him. When his mother sings a lament to a dead son, it is the writer’s imagining of what his mom will say if he doesn’t survive the surgery.

The writer’s boss, the host of a children’s TV show, exists as a negative voice inside the songwriter’s mind. One of the brilliant strokes in A New Brain is presenting the boss as a comic hallucination and putting him onstage, although invisible to all of the characters except the songwriter.

Because of the extremely short rehearsal time, it wouldn’t be fair to judge individual performances. I must state that the ten-person ensemble was superb, including Philadelphia favorites such as Steve Pacek, Melissa Joy Hart, Alex Keiper, Ben Michael, Rob Tucker, and Michael Philip O’Brien. The superb music director, at the keyboard, was Amanda Morton.