How Can Transparent Continue Without Tambour
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After Times of Turmoil, 'Transparent' Goes Out Singing
The influential series, which fired the actor Jeffrey Tambor over sexual harassment allegations, will wrap up with a musical finale.
LOS ANGELES — Last February, Jill and Faith Soloway were filming the final episode of "Transparent" here at Paramount Pictures, in the studio's cavernous Stage 14. It was the last day of a 20-day shoot, and Judith Light , as the nettlesome matriarch Shelly Pfefferman, was tearing through "Your Boundary Is My Trigger," a show tune-slash-primal scream about how thankless it is to be a mother, and how Shelly gives and gives and gives, and for what?
"If I could, I'd shove you back inside me," Light sang, using her hands to show just what such a procedure might look like.
After a series of energetic takes surrounded by a chorus line of women in bras and girdles and men in long johns and bunny slippers, Light, all smiles, came over to the monitors to see how everything looked, and to hug people and call them "sweetie pie." Despite the lively dance number, there was a palpable sense that things were coming to a close, as longtime colleagues, some in costume, some in street clothes, said their goodbyes.
Welcome to "Transparent," the musical, which will air on Amazon Prime Video on Sept. 27 and mark the end of the show's groundbreaking run. Entitled "Transparent: Musicale Finale," the 100-minute movie opens with a narratively expedient and also deeply symbolic move: the death of Jeffrey Tambor's protagonist, Maura Pfefferman , who set the series in motion by coming out as transgender, an arc based on Soloway's own family history. ( The death happens offscreen — Tambor doesn't appear in the film .)
Then, the concept goes, Shelly writes a musical about the family as a means of coping with the tragedy, much to the chagrin of her three grown children, played by Amy Landecker , Jay Duplass and Gaby Hoffmann .
"The kids go through the stages of grief and Shelly goes through, well, creative rebirth," said the show creator Jill Soloway , who directed the episode and was one of the writers. (Faith Soloway, Jill's sister, was the other.)
The series-ending movie is also a kind of final rebirth for the show itself, after its star Tambor, who won two Emmys and plenty of acclaim for his memorable portrayal of Maura, was fired after two "Transparent" colleagues accused him of sexual misconduct. At the time, "Transparent" had already been picked up for a fifth season, and the situation put its future in limbo.
"It's difficult to describe, going through that journey of my parent coming out, creating the TV show, having that rise in the culture and then the pain and trauma of what happened with Jeffrey," Jill said. "And then that place where we were all like, is the show going to be O.K.?"
With music and lyrics by Faith Soloway, the finale offered a joyful way to bounce back from the Tambor situation. It also served as a suitably inspired goodbye from an innovative show to the creatively fertile TV landscape it helped to shape.
"We realized that Faith and her music could create a new language for the show, where we could process feelings that probably couldn't have been processed through traditional episodes," Jill said.
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When "Transparent" premiered in 2014, there was little like it on television. There had been trans characters before , in shows ranging from comedies ("Glee") to soaps ("All My Children") to dramedies ( "Orange Is the New Black "). But most of them were in secondary roles or in single episode appearances.
Emmys soon followed, eight prizes out of 28 nominations , along with a string of three straight GLAAD Media Awards for best comedy series.
The finale arrives in a TV world far different from the one in which "Transparent" debuted. This year's Emmy nominations were dominated by idiosyncratic streaming dramedies by women like Phoebe Waller-Bridge ("Fleabag") and Natasha Lyonne ("Russian Doll"), while trans performers are tackling ever larger roles in series like "Pose" and "Orange Is the New Black," which also just ended. "Transparent" and Jill, who identifies as nonbinary, deserve a lot of credit for leading the way.
"Prior to 'Transparent,' there was never a TV show that centered a transgender narrative as the central focus of the show," said Nick Adams, GLAAD's director of transgender representation. "Other shows have featured transgender characters, but they weren't built around exploring a transgender person's identity and their relationship with their family."
And then, in November 2017 , Tambor was accused by a cast member, Trace Lysette , and his former assistant, Van Barnes , of sexual harassment. He was fired a few months later. (Tambor has repeatedly denied the allegations.)
" Jeffrey's behavior on set was really shocking to me," said Alexandra Billings, who played Davina in the series and in the upcoming finale. "And difficult, which is why we took a year off. All of us just needed to get away."
"But none of us, not Trace Lysette or Van Barnes or Zackary Drucker or Our Lady J ," she continued, "none of the trans people who worked on the show allowed it to infiltrate our artistic spirit."
Even so, a series about a trans parent's journey could hardly continue without the trans parent, the creators and producers concluded . But how to close out such a pioneering series?
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Faith always thought the series had the makings of a fine musical. It had outsized leads, a timely premise and ambitious themes. Over the years, the Pfeffermans had talked about everything from sex addiction to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Why not sing about it?
Faith actually had already written songs about the Pfeffermans over the years, catchy tunes with titles like "I Was the Lesbian First" and "Your Boundary Is My Trigger," Shelly's theme from the finale.
"This is what I do — I write music," Faith said. "I walk around, and the world is a song."
Even before the upheaval at the show, Faith had staged some of her Pfefferman tunes at Joe's Pub in June 2017, in a revue she called "Faith Soloway and Friends: Should Transparent Become a Musical?" As Jill contemplated the end, the answer to that question suddenly became clear.
"We've been sort of contemplating, one day, Broadway," Jill said. "But instead of contemplating, we just took all those songs and went, let's make a movie."
Back on the Paramount set, Faith was having her fake beard touched up. In addition to writing the show's songs, she has a small role in the film as Shmuley, Shelly's silent Uber driver and "former temple organist." In one of the film's many meta moments, Faith is writing the music for Shelly's musical (and, today, playing piano in a dream sequence).
"I always fantasized about having a beard," Faith said. "I love how it looks. But I hate how it feels! It's super itchy."
Why the beard? And why doesn't Shmuley speak? "I think we wanted to leave it up to the imagination of the viewer what my voice would sound like, and what my gender might be," Faith said. "Is Shmuley a trans man? A man? A woman playing a man?"
Shmuley is also the personification of Faith's longstanding belief in the dictum that music takes over when words fail. "I think Shmuley is a little bit of a spirit," she said.
Faith staged a second performance of her musical at Joe's Pub on April 2, 2018, two months after Tambor was fired. This time, she called the show "Songs from a Hopeful Musical"; the transgender actor and activist Shakina Nayfack played Maura. "It felt like the first really celebratory night for the family after the show had gone through the trauma," Jill said. "It was like, you know what? There's something alive here. I was crying watching the songs."
"My mom was there, and Judith was there," she continued.
"And I was there," Faith chimed in.
"And you were there, and you were there!" Jill exclaimed, pointing to various cast and crew members on the soundstage. "Everybody was there."
One of the initial ideas for the finale was to have the singers who played the Pfefferman kids in the Joe's Pub performances — Lesli Margherita , Erik Liberman and Jo Lampert , a.k.a. "the fake Pfeffs" — do the singing in a kind of musical within a musical.
"And then our actors were like, 'We want to sing and dance, too,'" Jill said. "Everybody wanted a song, everybody wanted their moment."
And nearly everyone got one. The finale opens with Landecker's rendition of "Sepulveda Blvd ," an ode to one of LA's less-celebrated streets, and ends with "Joyocaust," a "turn that frown upside down" musical take on the Final Solution.
"Jews don't have a drinking song, like Irish people do," Faith said. "So it feels like a Jewish drinking song. It's a combination of borscht belt humor, gallows humor and a drinking song for Jews."
In addition to Pfeffermans real and fake, the show brought back many of the show's most popular characters, including Rabbi Raquel Fein (Kathryn Hahn ), Len Novak (Rob Huebel ) and Shea (Lysette).
Nayfack, who starred as Maura in the Joe's Pub shows, was on set, too, in her first ever appearance on "Transparent." In the finale she plays Ava, a congenial weed dealer, and is also one of the show's producers, alongside Billings. If the series would have started in 2019, it never would have cast a cisgender man in the lead, Jill said, and the show has consistently pushed to include trans people within its cast and crew.
"At some point, somebody told me we were the second largest employer of trans people, after the military," Jill said.
Nearly all of the cast were here on the final day of shooting, whether they were needed or not. Chants of "Judith Light, Judith Light" went up following her final take, and scores of actors and crew members assembled for a group shot soon after. "All we've been doing is crying," Jill said.
But according to several of the people in attendance, this isn't the end of "Transparent," not really. "The show isn't ending, it's transitioning," Jill said.
"It feels weirdly like a bridge to something," Billings said. "There was a lot of forgiveness on the set. If feels like the beginning of something else."
Like maybe a theatrical version? That's still a goal, the Soloways said. "I always wanted to do a stage version first," Faith said. "And then we had, you know, the struggles we had last year."
"If I were to get egotistical about it, there are certain plays like 'Angels in America' and 'Rent' that sort of named queerness and named AIDS," she continued. "That's what I would hope 'Transparent,' as a television show or as a musical, could help to do. To help people understand some of the things that we're going through, as a culture, right now."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/arts/television/transparent-musical-finale.html
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