William Finn, a witty, brain and psychologically keen musical writer, won two Tony awards “falsettos” and passed away on Monday in Bennington. He is 73 years old.
His long-term partner, Arthur Salvadore, said that in a hospital, the cause of death was pulmonary fibrosis, and Mr. Finn had fought nervous system problems in the years since. He has houses on Williamstown, Massachusetts and on the upper west side of Manhattan.
Mr. Finn is widely praised for his cleverness, complex lyrics and the poignant honesty of his exploration of the characters. He is gay and Jewish, and his most important work involves these communities. In the 1990s, he made a living by “fake” and was one of the first artists to musically tragedy of AIDS. His musical “New Brain” was inspired by his own arterial malformations, life-threatening experience.
“In the pantheon of the great composer Lesis, Bill himself is special – no one sounds like him,” said André Bishop, production art director at Lincoln Center Theatre. He introduced Mr. Finn’s seven performances, starting from the playwright’s horizon in the late 1970s and continuing at Lincoln Center.
Mr Bishop added: “He was called this witty lyricist, and he wrote a lot of complex songs that were not dealing with in that era, but what he really had was such a huge heart – his performance was very popular because his talent was beautiful, easy to obtain, easy to obtain, passionate and heartfelt.”
Mr. Finn played various roles throughout his career, being a composer, lyricist and sometimes librettist. Stephen Holden wrote in 2003 in New York Times, Mr. Finn wrote in The New York Times that his songs often feature “word-like introspective urbanization.”
The music and lyrics written by Mr. Finn arrived on Broadway in 2005 (actors include Jesse Tyler Ferguson), which is “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and is regularly collaborated with Finn by James Lapine. The show is about a bunch of clumsy teenagers participating in the spelling bees, running on Broadway for nearly three years and has been a huge success: It has produced more than 7,000 times in a professional, community and school environment over the past 16 years, according to Musical Theater President Drew Cohen, its international scholarship, and that’s it.
Mr. Finn likes Berkshire people in western Massachusetts and has a long relationship with the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which held the Prime Minister for the 25th Putnam County Spelling Bee in a high school cafeteria in the summer of 2004.
Mr. Finn, who had a home in Pittsfield for many years, continued to build a musical theatre lab on the Barrington stage to develop and present the work of young writers. Until his death, he was an associate artist on the Barrington stage and showed off a revival of the “new brain” in the 2023 theater.
“Bill is smart, quirky, compassionate and very interesting, and he understands the authenticity of people – real emotions that make them do what they are doing.” Ms. Boyd, who has lived in Pittsfield for years across the street, said he is particularly committed to developing young writers as teachers, as the founder of the Musical Theater Lab, and for years the host of Labor Day weekends, celebrating “the ridiculously talented composer and lyricist songs you may not know, but you may not know.”
Mr. Finn also has a long affiliation with NYU, where he is an adjunct assistant professor in the graduate theater writing program from 1999 to 2019.
Even though he has slowed down in recent years, he is still working. El Salvador said he has been developing a song cycle about the pandemic, called “One”.
William Alan Finn was born on February 28, 1952 in Boston and grew up in Natick, Massachusetts. His mother, Barbara (Corn) Finn, had a variety of jobs and at some point owned a consignment store.
Finn, a lifelong theater enthusiast, claims to be the first play of the Hebrew school program. “I don’t know what this is,” he told the tablet. “But it’s so scary, I promise. I can’t write dramas, I can’t really speak Hebrew, so how good is it?”
He attended Natick High School and then at Williams College in Williamstown where he wrote three musicals. He graduated from Williams in 1974, from English and American Civilization. The college awarded him an adult medal in 1998, received an honorary degree in 2006, and received a Kellogg Prize in 2009. Last year, at his 50th college reunion, his last song cycle was performed there.
After graduating from Williams and taking a short detour to California, he moved to New York, and over the years he wrote three musicals about a character named Marvin who left his wife and eventually settled with his sexuality and his family: “In the Trousers” (1979), “The March of Falsettos” (1981) and “Falsettolandoland” (1990). All three are staged in the playwright’s vision.
The Times’ Richard Eder (“The naked germ of an idea”) made a “fake” “in the pants” but “fake March” scored from the newspaper’s Frank Rich (“The show was only a few bars older than a few little bars, and in one person who felt pure, pure talent” and Mr. Finn.
Mr Rich claimed that “March of Falsettos” and “Falsettoland” were eventually merged into a show “Falsettos,” which opened on Broadway in 1992 (“exciting and heartbreaking,” Mr Rich claimed). The show won two Tony Awards for Mr. Finn’s achievements and his book, which Mr. Finn and Mr. Lapien wrote. The show was revised and revived on Broadway in 2016 (“exciting, devastating,” writes Charles Eastwood of the Times) and is regularly performed elsewhere.
The “forgery” ending with the death of the main character is followed by more challenging work, including “The New Brain” (1998), which was placed primarily in hospitals, and Mr. Finn wrote “The Lost Love” (2003) in the 2001 terrorist attack, which was caused by the 2001 terrorist attack.
But then it was the “spelling bee”, which quickly moved from the Barrington stage to the second stage of Broadway Run, and then to Broadway. He told the Charlotte Observer in 2006: “I was walking around a little like a drunk idiot.
Over the years, Mr. Finn also has a variety of projects, including a musical adaptation of the 2006 film Miss Sun, which ran away on Broadway in 2013 and a fight against George S. Kaufman (George S.
In addition to his 45-year-old partner, Mr. Salvador, he also survived his sister, Nancy Davis. brother Michael; and many nieces, nephews, granddaughters and granddaughters.
“Bill is totally original – Sui Generis,” Mr. Lapinesaid in an interview Tuesday. . “The song just pours out of him, always in his voice, always very personal.”
