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Transparent: Musicale Finale review – gloriously close to the bone

This game-changing, risk-taking series bows out with jazzhands, hilarious show tunes and a jaw-dropping final send-off for the Pfefferman family

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.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2matdgR
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