Fanny: A Fantasy in G ★★★

Off-Brand Opera is a company that likes to encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations to blur performance genres, and in Fanny, a Fantasy in G, now playing at A.R.T./New York before moving to the Liederkranz Club for the remainder of its run, that goal is clear upon entering the theater. Standing right in the center of the playing space on a circular revolve is a Weber grand piano, its symbolic centrality distinct and strong for this fantasia about unheralded Fanny Mendelssohn, the older sister of Felix. Felix is the Mendelssohn most audiences know today; among many wonderful pieces, he composed the ubiquitous “Wedding March” played for nuptials around the globe.

That well-known tune is heard during the course of the show, as are so many others, almost all played by the Muse, aka Piano Woman (Melody Fader), a classical pianist who rarely leaves the stage, providing gorgeous accompaniment for the dramatics around her: Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Chopin, and, of course, both Mendelssohn siblings. Lovely as the music is — and it is — the Muse and her piano are not as fully integrated as they could be given that they are distinct characters in this show. This is a fantasy, after all. As playwright Tim McGillicuddy writes in the prologue: “It’s a fantasy this play/Let’s not be too literal, eh?”

But for all its talk of fantasy, this biodrama proves stubbornly literal. McGillicuddy has done his research and is clearly passionate about his subject, but too much of the script is unwieldy in its efforts to include so much external history at the expense of the inner life and workings of Fanny. Hints are given, but surely at times there was intense sibling rivalry between these two music prodigies. How could there not have been, especially since Fanny, who composed more than 450 pieces of her own, saw few of them published simply because of her gender?

Unlike in Amadeus, where Mozart’s fellow creator Antonio Salieri suffers in the knowledge that he is a lesser talent, Fanny has no such issue; she and Felix acknowledge each other as equals and were apparently incredibly close. But in this script, Felix is vastly underwritten, a wandering footnote to what’s going on in Fanny’s life. It feels like a lost opportunity.

Instead, we get much more of Fanny’s parents, Abraham and Una, and her sister, Becka, and most of the production’s scenes take place in the parlors of their various apartments in Berlin in the second quarter of the 1800s. Somewhat unexpectedly, it’s when the characters leave those parlors that things go narratively off-course, save for a second-act interlude in Rome that galvanizes the entire production to a level of theatrical resplendency.

It’s in that Italian number that director George Abud, himself an acclaimed musical theater actor from The Visit, The Band’s Visit and Lempicka, is really able to ignite the show. Oddly, a few scene transitions early in the play lack musical underscoring when it’s most needed, and the production as a whole seems to take a while to warm up. At the start many of the actors can’t help but declaim their lines as to ensure themselves and the audience that they are — faw faw faw — playing real historical figures in a costume drama set two centuries ago. Fortunately, and perhaps it was initial nerves doing their dirty deeds, everyone settles in and ends up giving believable performances. Also slightly problematic: the worrisomely flimsy set, which made one wonder if one of the Mendelssohns was doomed to be crushed by a wall.

Enough naysaying. Time to change the tempo and highlight this show’s many virtues.

McGillicuddy is primarily a poet, and the language often soars, as when friend and fellow composer Charles Gounod describes how he wishes to protect Fanny and her work: “They applaud, coolly, but they are spies. Watching, waiting. They have infiltrated this ground, now made sacred by your work, which you have left open to ‘everyone’ in the hopes of changing minds.”

The show also excels any time Abud and McGillicuddy lean into the fantasy and poetic elements of Fanny’s story, such as when she describes an Italian vista she saw as a child while underscored by the piano. All the music is, needless to say, performed superbly. Also superb: Raul Luna’s costumes. Rarely are such rich and detailed costumes seen in an Off-Broadway show.

Of the performances in this grandly sized cast, theater veterans Rufus Collins and especially Úna Clancy make impactful marks as parents Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn, and Annalisa Chamberlin as Fanny progresses beautifully from a flighty, frustrated girl of great talent to a woman who knows her talent and worth despite circumstances to the contrary. Most impressive is Daniel David Stewart as painter Wilhelm Hensel, Fanny’s husband. The air changes with his entrance, electric with possibility, and his courtship scenes with Chamberlin elevate the play significantly.

Excitingly, the show gets its ending right, concluding with Fanny alone at her piano, the others — dead and alive — from her life facing outwards to the audience, absorbing stunning music that will only later be given its due. The moment is transcendent, a fitting tribute to a woman whose talent will prove to last the ages.