This is a thing about Friedman’s compositions. In the moment, they can seem disposable pastiche. But their lightness is indelible. There’s surprise in the way that the recognizable signatures play against the brainy, wrong-footing rhymes.

1. STEVE COSSON
Welcome
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3. Review: ‘Gone Missing,’ Now a Poignant
Reminder of a Life Cut Short

4. The two-night revival of “Gone Missing” at New York
City Center is both a very good show and a very bad,
very cosmic joke. Because this documentary song cycle
is about loss: of minds, rings, a dog, the hour badly
spent. And the irretrievable loss, the one you can hear
in pretty much every plink and strum from the onstage
band, is the loss of the show’s composer, Michael
Friedman, who died a year ago from AIDS-related
complications. Which makes “Gone Missing” an
accidental and indispensable elegy.

6. The show, which has a book by Steven Cosson,
was originally created and performed by The
Civilians theater company in 2003. It was built on
more-or-less verbatim interviews that company
members conducted with both people who have
lost things and people whose job it is to find them.
Mr. Cosson arranged the interviews into a series of
monologues, and Peter Morris dreamed up some
public radio-style segments, while Friedman
composed songs that expanded, sweetly and tartly,
on the themes that emerged.

8. The songs range — any Friedman score (“Bloody
Bloody Andrew Jackson,” “The Fortress of Solitude,”
“Pretty Filthy”) is almost necessarily rangy — from
mariachi to Burt Bacharach bossa nova. Some of the
anecdotes that connect them are cute, and some are
alarming. Good luck forgetting the crack about a
“Colombian necktie.” Most are funny, including a
prized bit about an actress who lost a shoe at P.S.
122 back when it was still called P.S. 122.

9. As the cop who
defines the
Colombian necktie
says, sometimes
humor is the only
way to meet
horrifying loss:
“You got to laugh.
You just got to
laugh.”

11. Ken Rus Schmoll directs a six-person cast for this
production, part of the Encores! Off-Center season:
Taylor Mac, Susan Blackwell, David Ryan Smith,
Deborah S. Craig and John Behlmann, alongside the
longtime Civilians member Aysan Celik. The setting is
minimal, the costumes pleasantly generic, Karla Puno
Garcia’s choreography decidedly low profile and Mr.
Schmoll’s direction affectionate and barely there. The
actors still carry scripts, though that is no bar to Mr.
Mac’s dangerous enthusiasm or Ms. Blackwell’s mild-
mannered insanity or Ms. Celik’s infectious disdain.

13. I saw “Gone Missing” at
the long-gone Belt
Theater in 2003 and then
again a few years later at
the Barrow Street
Theater. Listening on
Wednesday night, I was
thrilled to discover that I
remembered every single
song, though I hadn’t
heard them in more than
a decade.

15. From left, Mr. Smith, Taylor Mac, Ms. Blackwell, John Behlmann,
Deborah S. Craig and Aysan. The actors still carry scripts, though
that is no bar to Mr. Mac’s dangerous enthusiasm or Ms. Blackwell’s
mild-mannered insanity or Ms. Celik’s infectious disdain.CreditEmon
Hassan for The New York Times

17. This is a thing about Friedman’s
compositions. In the moment, they can
seem disposable pastiche. But their
lightness is indelible. There’s surprise
in the way that the recognizable
signatures play against the brainy,
wrong-footing rhymes.

18. That said, the songs don’t sound
the same. We’re all 15 years
older (those of us who got to
grow older, anyway), and the
points of impact have shifted.
Hearing them, I felt a happy-sad
nostalgia, not only for the
composer himself but also for
the theater scene that birthed
him — those theaters in the East
Village and the Lower East Side
and those post-show bars, many
of them now gone.

20. At the Encores performance, I caught some
jokes that had whizzed past me before. From the
Gershwin-ish “The Only Thing Missing”: “Think
what my nephew Chris/ Just lost at his bris.”
Because yes, ha ha ha, foreskin. But also, who
names a Jewish kid Chris? And don’t tell me
Friedman needed the name for the rhyme,
because he could rhyme anything. I give you
“Etch A Sketch,” a song about memory loss,
which pairs “tabula rasa” and “Kinshasa.”

21. I heard something else in
that song, a rhymed
chorus that didn’t really
rhyme: “I’m an Etch a
Sketch (But now I’m all
shook up)/ I’m a piece of
wax (But now the imprint’s
lost.”) That slant rhyme
makes the song
deliberately unfinished. It’s
up to us listeners to make
it whole.

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