Falsettos.

Kiss me as hard as you dare./I have to know that you're there." Count Vronsky sang those lines - or lines very like them - to Anna Karenina when, no longer able to contain her supposedly seething passion, she turned up at his apartment. This lyric was die ludicrous high point of a new musical that makes a foolish hash of Tolstoy's novel. Thus the new theater season limpingly began. There seems little reason to dwell on this disaster although one might wonder what it was doing at the Circle in the Square and why so much grant money went into the making of it. I will turn instead to two holdovers from last season - at least, they are holding on as I write this - which I did not review when they were new.

Falsettos is a Broadway musical that William Finn and James Lapine put together from their earlier, short off-Broadway pieces, March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990). I postponed going to the new show because Falsettoland, which I reviewed in these pages (December 21, 1990) was so relentlessly lively that it seemed to trivialize both the coming-of-age play (Jason's accepting his father's homosexuality and the death of Whizzer, his father's lover) and the AIDS context in which the action takes place. I did not see March of the Falsettos in its initial production. For that reason, I was unprepared for the force of the first act of Falsettos, which is presumably March reborn. Surprisingly, since it dates from the innocent gay days before AIDS was clearly perceived as the horror it has become, the first act is darker, tougher, funnier, more inventive than the later work. The titular "March of the Falsettos," an eerie, almost expressionistic number, is at once comic and frightening. Running through the act is the insistence that love can be as painful as it is fulfilling. This can be seen not only in the often frenetic company numbers, but in "I'm Breaking Down," a solo for Trina, who loses Marvin to Whizzer, and in Whizzer's "The Games I Play." It is an atmosphere in which the confusion of the adults (Marvin, Whizzer, Trina, Marvin's psychiatrist Mendel, who courts Trina), their distrust of and compulsion about commitment, makes Jason's adjustment all the more difficult.

Although "Father to Son," the curtain number of the first act, suggests that Jason is beginning to sort out his problems and that Marvin is less of an aging adolescent than he usually seems, the play - if it stopped here - would remain open-ended, carrying the suggestion of complexity that marks most of the act. But Falsettos moves on to the second act, and the chirpiness of Falsettoland takes over. The troubled five characters of the first act are joined by a cheerful lesbian couple who are there mostly for laughs, although they sound the first AIDS warning in "Something Bad Is Happening." The tone - despite Whizzer's death - is noticeably upbeat and not simply in the Jason plot. Perhaps that is why the show has caught on with such a large and diverse audience. On the train from Philadelphia the other day, a suburban couple exchanged information with a group of equally suburban ladies and all of them were on their way to see Falsettos. Their grandmothers would have been on the way to see the Lunts in O Mistress Mine. I have no quarrel with the success of Falsettos, but the first act suggests that Finn and Lapine could have produced a more sardonic work. Even the last moment here, Mendel's return to "Welcome to Falsettoland" which opens the act, is almost a throwaway line, not quite casting a retrospective irony over the act's sprightliness as happened with Fasettoland when I first saw it.