James Lapine Talks His New Film and What to Expect From Falsettos

Your next Broadway project is the Falsettos revival. So many things have changed in the gay world since the first part was written in the 1970s. Attitudes were changing as they were being written in the midst of the early AIDS crisis, and now it’s 2016, and gay marriage is legal. Is all that going to be reflected at all or is it going to be directed in period?
James Lapine: It will definitely be in period. I don’t think it can not be in period. One of the impulses to do it was, I took my 23-year-old NYU grad assistant to see The Normal Heart, the revival, and at intermission, she turned to me and said, “I know about AIDS, but was it really like this?” And I thought geez, has time gone like that so quickly? That the whole spectrum of what we lived through at that time is not being told to young people?

There was a period of time we were going to a funeral a week.
James Lapine: I know. So that made me feel like there had to be a way to do something about that. Then, just coincidentally, I happened to be sitting next to [producer] Jordan Roth, and I just casually said, “Anything on our bucket list you want to do?” And he said Falsettos, and I said, “We’ll do it.” So that’s how the ball got rolling on that... READ MORE

Photograph by Joseph Marzullo / WENN