William Finn, Tony recipient for ‘Falsettos,' is dead at 73

Boston Globe

09-04-2025

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'In the pantheon of great composer-lyricists, Bill was idiosyncratically himself — there was nobody who sounded like him,' said André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. He presented seven of Mr. Finn's shows, starting at the famed Playwrights Horizons in the late 1970s and continuing at Lincoln Center.
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'He became known as this witty wordsmith who wrote lots of complicated songs dealing with things people didn't deal with in song in those days,' Bishop added, 'but what he really had was this huge heart — his shows are popular because his talent was beautiful and accessible and warm and heartfelt.'
Mr. Finn played varying roles across his career, as a composer, a lyricist, and sometime librettist. His songs often feature 'a wordy introspective urbanity,' as Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times in 2003. In 'A New Brain,' Mr. Finn seemed to distill his passion for the art form, writing, 'Heart and music keep us all alive.'
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'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,' for which he wrote the music and lyrics, arrived on Broadway in 2005 (the cast included Jesse Tyler Ferguson), directed by James Lapine, a frequent collaborator with Mr. Finn. The show, about a group of awkward adolescents competing in a spelling bee, ran for nearly three years on Broadway and has been wildly successful: Over the last 16 years, it has been produced more than 7,000 times in professional, community, and school settings, according to Drew Cohen, CEO of Music Theater International, which licenses it.
Mr. Finn loved the Berkshires and had a long relationship with the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield,which presented the premiere of 'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee' in a high school cafeteria in the summer of 2004.
Mr. Finn, who for years had a home in Pittsfield, went on to establish a musical theater lab at Barrington Stage to wrestle the work of young writers into shape.
'I'm good at sniffing talent out,'' he told critic Don Aucoin of The Boston Globe in 2016.
Mr. Finn founded the Barrington Stage Company's Musical Theatre Lab.
Steven G. Smith
Under the supervision of Mr. Finn and Julianne Boyd, then the theater's artistic director, the lab spawned at least a dozen world premiere productions.
'I always enjoy things that are dirty, rather than finished,'' Mr. Finn told the Globe. 'What's interesting is seeing the dirty beginnings of a real talent. I love everyone's early voice. It's a person screaming to be heard.''
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He remained an associate artist at Barrington Stage until his death, and in 2023 the theater presented a well-received revival of 'A New Brain.'
'Bill was brilliant, quirky, compassionate and very funny, and he understood the truth of people — the true emotions that led them to do what they were doing,' said Boyd, who for years lived across the street from Finn in Pittsfield. For years, Boyd said, Mr. Finn was the host of a Labor Day weekend celebration of 'songs by ridiculously talented composers and lyricists you probably don't know but should.'
Mr. Finn also had a long affiliation with New York University, where he was an adjunct assistant professor in the graduate musical theater writing program from 1999 to 2019.
Even as he slowed down in recent years, he continued to work. He had been developing a song cycle about the pandemic, called 'Once Every Hundred Years,' Salvadore said.
William Alan Finn was born Feb. 28, 1952, in Boston and raised in Natick. His father, Jason Finn, worked for a paper products company; his mother, Barbara (Cohen) Finn, had a variety of jobs and at one point owned a consignment store.
A lifelong theater lover, Mr. Finn claimed to have written his first play as a Hebrew School project. 'I have no idea what it was about,' he told Tablet, a Jewish magazine. 'But it was horrible, I guarantee it. I couldn't write plays, and I couldn't really speak Hebrew, so how good could it be?'
He attended Natick High and then Williams College, where he wrote three musicals. He graduated from Williams in 1974 with majors in English and American civilization. The college gave him its Bicentennial Medal for achievement in 1998, an honorary degree in 2006, and its Kellogg Award in 2009. Last year, at his 50th college reunion, his final song cycle was performed there.
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After graduating from Williams and a brief detour to California, he moved to New York, where over several years he wrote a trio of musicals about a character named Marvin who leaves his wife for a man and ultimately reconciles with both his sexuality and his family: 'In Trousers' (1979), 'March of the Falsettos' (1981) and 'Falsettoland' (1990). All three were staged at Playwrights Horizons.
'In Trousers' was panned by Richard Eder of the Times ('A bare germ of an idea,' he wrote), but 'March of the Falsettos' scored a rave from the newspaper's Frank Rich ('The show is only a few bars old before one feels the unmistakable, revivifying charge of pure talent'), and Mr. Finn was on his way.
'March of the Falsettos' and 'Falsettoland' were ultimately combined into one show, 'Falsettos,' which opened on Broadway in 1992 ('Exhilarating and heartbreaking,' Rich declared). The show won two Tony Awards, for Mr. Finn's scores and for its book, which he wrote with Lapine. The show was revised and revived on Broadway in 2016.
'Falsettos,' which ends with the death of a main character, was followed by even more challenging work, including 'A New Brain' (1998), which is set primarily in a hospital, and a song cycle called 'Elegies' (2003), which Mr. Finn wrote about lost loved ones, prompted by the terrorist attacks of 2001. 'As his work has grown graver, the audience for it has contracted,' Jesse Green wrote in the Times in 2005.
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But that was followed by 'Spelling Bee,' which transferred quickly from Barrington Stage to an off-Broadway run at Second Stage, and then to Broadway. That show was life-changing for Mr. Finn, 'success on a different magnitude,' he told The Charlotte Observer in 2006, adding, 'I kind of walk around smiling like a drunken idiot.'
Jesse Tyler Ferguson starred in 'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee' in Manhattan in 2005.
SARA KRULWICH/NYT
Mr. Finn had a variety of other projects over the years, including a musical adaptation of the 2006 film 'Little Miss Sunshine,' which had a run Off Broadway in 2013, and a musical adaptation of the George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber play 'The Royal Family,' called 'The Royal Family of Broadway,' which had a run at Barrington Stage in 2018.
In addition to Salvadore, his partner of 45 years, he leaves a sister, Nancy Davis; and a brother, Michael.
'Bill was totally original — sui generis,' Lapine said in an interview Tuesday. 'Songs just poured out of him, always in his voice and always very personal.'
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