It opens, as so many great musicals have, with a closeup of feet posing in legwarmers. A classic American number about driving down an LA boulevard, though an obscure one, Sepulveda, which sounds a lot like sepulchre. It closes, as no musical has ever done, with a jazzhands-in-the-air show tune about the Final Solution, called Joyocaust. A Jewish Make ’Em Laugh about taking “the concentration out of the camps” to concentrate “on some song and dance” that does precisely what this glorious, game-changing show has always done best: make ’em laugh, cry, cringe and think, all at the same time. Here is the Transparent: Musicale Finale (Amazon Prime) you dreamed of – heavy-going, light as a feather, uproarious and unbearably sad. Even its flaws are perfect. Thank. Non-binary. God.
The stakes were nosebleed high. Fans grieved for the show and its family, both real and created, when it emerged last year that Jeffrey Tambor had been accused of sexual harassment by a cast member and former assistant. The tangle of reality and art, of what happens on and off set, has always been fundamental to the genius and integrity of Transparent. It is, after all, a show made by the child of a trans parent. A child, Jill Soloway, who transitioned during the making of it and now identifies as non-binary. This stuff always matters, but in Transparent it really mattered.
Soloway’s practical solution was to fire Tambor, who continues to deny the allegations. Creatively, the solution was mischievous and entirely on song. Kill Maura off. Focus, in a feature-length, defiantly joyous musical that opens with her off-screen death, on the histrionic fallout. A tragedy for which you could say the Pfeffermans have been rehearsing their entire lives.
So finally Shelly, the matriarch who had to make do with being in Maura’s shadow for four seasons, gets the spotlight. And oh, how she milks it. Her big number, delivered to her traumatised children (plus the actors playing them in the play of the Pfeffermans’ lives Shelly writes in a mushroom cloud of grief) is called Your Boundary is My Trigger. Which is impossible to write, let alone watch, without bursting into laughter. But this is Transparent: a universe where a joke is never only played for laughs. What begins as hand-over-mouth hilarious ends as a howl of pain at a mother’s sacrifice until, with tears in her eyes and throat, Shelly (Judith Light, who deserves every award going) whisper-sings: “I don’t know boundaries / Never knew I should have them / So how could I know yours?” Tragicomedy, as only the greatest musicals can sing it.
As for the genre shift, Transparent was always a musical without songs when it came to tone. The hysteria that loving and dysfunctional families induce in us has always been its emotional high note, so it feels entirely normal for Sarah, Josh and Ari (who has transitioned from Ali) to break into song after discovering their Moppa is dead. “What the fuck?” “What the fuck?” “What the actual fucking fuck?” they sing, one by one, charging down the family stairs. It’s neither toe-tapping stuff nor delivered with Broadway polish, but it is spot-on.
Meanwhile, the show within the show goes on. Shelly gathers a creative team comprised of Ari’s weed dealer – sorry, healer – Ava (Shakina Nayfack) who wins the role of Maura, giving this landmark lead to a trans actor at last. Shelly’s Uber driver, a shy “temple organist from Albuquerque” drafted in to score the show, is played by Faith Soloway, Jill’s sister, who wrote the actual songs. It makes Charlie Kaufman look like Rodgers and Hammerstein. The meta-levels are off the scale.
Some will feel it’s too outrageously close to the bone, but this is what it means to take risks all the way to the final curtain. There are actual jokes about the Holocaust. When Sarah’s children confuse Maura’s cremation with the death camps, their mother is forced to explain the inexplicable: that “cremation is a completely different oven”. Ultimately, Transparent goes out with what Shelly calls “an equal and opposite reaction to the Holocaust”. It ends as it began: with a recalcitrant communion of Jewishness, difference and families made, lost and found. Perhaps most subversive of all for this relentlessly boundary-pushing show, what we get is what we might least expect to emerge from so much trauma and loss. A happy ending.
