Song and death Elegies and Lizzie Borden: The Musical BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Elegies: A Song Cycle By William Finn. Directed by Paul Daigneault. Music direction and accompaniment by Paul S. Katz. Set by Caleb Wertenbaker. Costumes by Amanda Mujica. Lighting by Michael J. Eddy. With Leigh Barrett, José Delgado, Kerry Dowling, Will McGarrahan, and Michael Mendiola. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through May 29. Lizzie Borden: The Musical Music and book by Christopher McGovern. Lyrics by McGovern and Amy Powers. Directed and choreographed by Bill Castellino. Music direction by Timothy Evans. Set by Craig Siebels. Costumes by Rachel Padula Shufelt. Lighting by Paul Miller. With Jayne Paterson, Andrea Ross, Ellen Peterson, Dale Place, Delina Christie, Sara Inbar, Kelly Ebsary, Christopher Chew, Kent French, Corey Jackson, Michael Kreutz, Natalie Brown, Ceit McCaleb, and Megan Gleeson. At Stoneham Theatre through May 30.

A musical about murder and another about dead people — what happened to the waving wheat and promenading matchmakers that used to be staples of the warbling stage? By the look of it, Sweeney Todd has slashed lovable Dolly Levi’s throat when it comes to the current trend in American musicals. Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, an uncomfortable denizen of Off Broadway in 1991, has made it to Broadway, where the times seem to have caught up with its fantasia about folks who’ve tried to kill the president. And on local stages, Christopher McGovern & Amy Powers’s Lizzie Borden: The Musical, a Sondheimian songfest centered on Fall River’s corseted lady with a hatchet, and William Finn’s Elegies, a collection of musical obituaries, open back to back in well-sung productions. We’re not in Kansas — or Oklahoma! — anymore.

But when you think about it, Agnes de Mille famously choreographed a killing for Oklahoma! And one of the best songs in Elegies, a stirring ballad commemorating the composer’s late mother on a deathbed tour of her Natick neighborhood, reaffirms Dorothy’s discovery that there’s no place like home. That’s a sentiment implicit in the accumulatively powerful Lizzie Borden as well; its infamous protagonist, miraculously acquitted, does not, like O.J., take off for Florida (and the hunt for the real killer) but uses diced daddy’s money to buy a big house in the familiar community that will ostracize her for the next 35 years.

Elegies, which debuted last spring at Lincoln Center, is the latest idiosyncratic musical entertainment from the composer of the Tony-winning Falsettos, in which a neurotic Jewish man leaves his wife and son for a male lover who then dies of AIDS, and A New Brain, which is about Finn’s own brush with a brain tumor. It’s surprisingly upbeat for a show whose inspirations are all pushing up daisies. Seen here in a Boston premiere simply staged by SpeakEasy artistic director Paul Daigneault and complicatedly sung by a top-tier quartet of area performers, the song cycle, though quirky and sentimental, offers more of what it dubs "Infinite Joy" than of dirge. It’s a celebration of lives that happen to be over, from Public Theatre impresario Joe Papp’s to that of Finn’s mother and other friends and familiars, both human and canine. Initially titled Looking Up, the show has its eye on the heavens, not on the grave, and the melodies, jumpy but soaring, tend to move in that direction too.

Finn has said that he wrote Elegies, in part, to see whether art is an effective healer, and there is a peculiar, quite personal and even therapeutic quality to the work. Daigneault’s production doesn’t fight that; it’s set against a collage of projections that evoke the composer’s neighborhoods, from the picket fence and string of mailboxes of the Boston suburbs to suggestions of a late, lamented Korean grocery in New York and a street sign marking an intersection near where Papp presided over his Public fiefdom. So if you’re willing to go with the flow of Finn’s very specific intimations of mortality, you’ll hear some whimsical and affecting theater songs, their subjects ranging from a memorable childhood Passover (many of whose participants have since "passed over") to the long-ago all-male Thanksgivings hosted by deceased lawyer and gay-rights activist Mark Thalen to September 11. Finn is often compared with Sondheim, his idol, but here, as in Falsettos, the virtuosity is accompanied by Jewishness, eccentricity, and heart.

The show, rife with melody over which flit slightly off-kilter witty lyrics, alternates choral singing, even a fair amount of jaunty scatting, with chances for each of its performers to shine his or her high-wattage bulb. Local powerhouse Leigh Barrett is fierce as both the uncompromising English teacher of "Only One" and Finn’s salt-of-the-earth mom, Barbara, anthemically proclaiming her love for life at "14 Dwight Ave., Natick, Massachusetts." Kerry Dowling brings her rich soprano and warm persona to "Passover" ("this feast of no yeast") and the song Finn wrote for a pal with cancer who had wanted a Falsettos tune sung at her funeral, the unabashedly tear-jerking, try-and-shake-me ballad "Anytime (I Am There)."

The men get to share the ironic, mourning, warts-and-all Finn persona. José Delgado sings lead on the jazzy, up-tempo paean to Papp, who "never took crap/Except, perhaps, from writers," and shares with Dowling the explosion-driven yet life-affirming September 11 tribute "Goodbye/Boom Boom." Will McGarrahan brings laid-back intensity to "The Ballad of Jack Eric Williams (And Other 3-Name Composers)," signing off with a flourish as William Alan Finn. And lanky Michael Mendiola (in the guise of the composer’s younger brother) carries Barbara Finn’s optimistic torch through "When the Earth Stopped Turning" and wryly commemorates Finn’s roster of "My Dogs" (which rhymes "schipperke" with "unashamedly"). In keeping with the enterprise, graceful ivory tickler Paul S. Katz caps the finale with a trio of knells that sound almost chipper.

Lizzie Borden: The Musical begins on the sunny side of the street as well, with the clannish populace of 1892 Fall River, Massachusetts, bustling its Music Man–ish way through a hot-weather report in "Even for August." That combined with wooden utterances like "Mrs. Churchill, do come in; someone has killed Father," made me expect the worst. And I don’t mean the Benihana treatment of Andrew and Abby Borden we know to be the climax of the story. But the musical grows more agitated, creepy, and stately as it proceeds, in an impressionistic manner that jumps about among the courtroom, the past, and the events of that blistering August when, in composer/librettist McGovern’s not implausible arrangement of events, repressed rage boils over into bloodletting. The Stoneham production of the musical — which premiered in 1998 at New Jersey’s American Stage Company and was also produced by Goodspeed Musicals — is strengthened by the importation of Broadway vet Jayne Paterson, a creamy, accomplished singer who is also an actress of knotted intensity, to play the leading role. Would that the entire vocally impressive cast had her thespian chops.

Bill Castellino, who has been with Lizzie Borden since its first reading, is at the helm of the production, which offers aural richness devoid of the stridency dissonant music invites but whose drama ricochets between discomforting and stiff. That’s partly the fault of the script, which suffers from a bit of rigor mortis, despite its chilling — and convincing — presentation of Lizzie as the victim of long-time sexual abuse by an arid tightwad father whose second wife hated her child rival. In the staging, Lizzie is split down the middle between her adult self, played by Paterson, and an inner child, subtly personated by seventh-grader Andrea Ross, who has nastier stuff to which to apply her lovely voice and soulful presence than she did in the title role of last season’s Trinity Rep Annie.

McGovern and co-lyricist Amy Powers (who contributed two songs to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard) do not make Lizzie Borden just a potboiler. McGovern seems to have pored over inquest testimonies and trial transcripts before cooking up his version of events, which incorporates such apparently documentable assertions as that Lizzie was a church lady and a shoplifter and that the whole Borden family were put out of sorts in the days before the murder by a rancid mutton stew. He also tries to focus as much on the shocked yet tight-lipped community that wants the scandal to disappear and therefore does little to help the prosecution as he does on his strangulated Lizzie. Oh, and don’t forget the threat of the suffragette movement and general maltreatment by Victorian America of the Irish.

But the somewhat generic depiction of the church doyennes, local merchants, and booby detectives who don’t think a woman capable of murder is not as compelling as the net the musical wraps around its heroine. There is some fine harmonizing in the group numbers, but the songs you remember are the haunting duets and roiling solos for Lizzie and Young Lizzie, along with the conspiratorial "So Easily" for Lizzie and the sympathetic Irish handyman with the hatchet, a number that comes to a thrilling, jittery head. There’s also a spunky turn at Stoneham by Sara Inbar as the Bordens’ peppery Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, who with Christopher Chew’s yearning handyman delivers the resentment-driven "The Maggie Work" over a dissonant, marching piano. More in the music than in the script, Lizzie Borden, at its sweltering best, catches the sense of something fetid and overheated, about to burst. But it does so better behind closed doors than in the street.