William Finn

With his mix of societal awareness, humor, complex rhymes, and playful chromatic melodies, composer and lyricist William Finn was considered a successor to Stephen Sondheim. He established this reputation with an off-Broadway trilogy of one-act shows about the queer Jewish character Marvin (1979's In Trousers, 1981's March of the Falsettos, and 1990's Falsettoland), and later became best known for the Tony-winning Falsettos (1992) -- a combination of the second and third Marvin musicals -- and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005). With his career spanning five different decades, his final projects included a stage-musical adaptation of the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine and The Royal Family of Broadway (2018), a musical based on George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's play about the Barrymores. Finn grew up in Natick, Massachusetts, and attended Williams College, where, upon graduation, he was awarded the Hutchinson Fellowship for musical composition. (Sondheim earlier attended the same college and won the same fellowship.) Finn first came to attention with In Trousers, the first of the Marvin shows, which was developed by the Playwrights Horizons theater company and given a production off-off-Broadway starting on February 21, 1979. The piece -- for which Finn wrote the music, lyrics, and book -- combined lively, attractive music with provocative subject matter and witty lyrics, telling the story of Marvin, a contemporary man who grows up, marries, and leaves his wife for a man. Original Cast Records recorded a cast album of the show, which was released in 1979. Finn returned to the Marvin character with March of the Falsettos, which again began at Playwrights Horizons on May 20, 1981, before moving to an off-Broadway house for an eventual combined run of 298 performances. The work was celebrated at the time, and DRG Records recorded it for a cast album. Starting on March 2, 1983, Playwrights Horizons held a tryout of Finn's next musical, America Kicks Up Its Heels, but the show did not open formally. Finn reworked the material, which became Romance in Hard Times, opening for a short workshop production at the off-off-Broadway Public Theater on December 28, 1989. Finn was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984. He added lyrics to the music of Astor Piazzolla for the dance show Tango Apasionado, which opened off-off-Broadway on November 6, 1987. The show was reworked and renamed Dangerous Games for a short run beginning October 19, 1989, which gave Finn his Broadway debut. On June 28, 1990, Falsettoland, the third of the Marvin musicals, which followed its characters into the age of AIDS, opened at Playwrights Horizons, later moving to an off-Broadway house and earning a run of 215 performances, a cast album on DRG, and the Outer Critics Circle Award for best off-Broadway musical. Both one-act musicals, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland were combined into a two-act musical, Falsettos, which opened on Broadway on April 29, 1992. For this production, Finn won Tony Awards for best score and best book, the latter of which he shared with co-writer James Lapine. It ran 487 performances. Starting in the early '90s, Finn wrote songs for animated children's films, including The Poky Little Puppy's First Christmas (1992), Ira Sleeps Over (1993), The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1998), The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue (1999), and The Adventures of Tom Thumb and Thumbelina (2002). Around the same time, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, but eventually surgery was performed successfully. When he recovered, Finn wrote A New Brain (with Lapine as book co-writer), a musical about a composer of children's music who is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. It opened off-Broadway at the Lincoln Center Theater on June 18, 1998, and ran 78 performances. A New Brain won the Outer Critics Circle Award for the best off-Broadway musical of the season, and RCA Victor recorded a cast album. Four days after its opening, Finn's one-act play Painting You was included as part of the collection of one-act plays Love's Fire at the Public Theater. In 2000 and 2001, Finn and a group of singers performed an anthology of his work, Infinite Joy: The Songs of William Finn, at Joe's Pub, a nightclub within the Public Theater, and the show was recorded by RCA for an album released in May 2001. He next provided the songs and score for the hit 2005 musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which was nominated for the Tony for Best Musical. It earned Finn a Tony nomination for Best Original Score as well as Drama Desk nominations for Outstanding Music and Outstanding Lyrics. He followed that with the off-Broadway revue Make Me a Song (2007), which was accompanied by a cast album issued on Ghostlight. His next original musical was Little Miss Sunshine, adapted from the successful independent film of the same name with his book co-writer James Lapine. It opened at California's La Jolla Playhouse in early 2011, then opened off-Broadway in late 2013. Falsettos was revived on Broadway in October 2016 (with Lapine directing). Before it closed three months later, two January performances were filmed and combined for an episode of PBS' Live from Lincoln Center. A national tour of the revival was launched in 2019. In the meantime, Finn's long-brewing musical adaptation of the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play The Royal Family, about the multigenerational Barrymore family of actors, opened in Massachusetts in June 2018. Featuring a book by Lapine and Rachel Sheinkin, it was first workshopped in the late '90s. It proved to the last premiere of a new work in Finn's lifetime. William Finn died of pulmonary fibrosis on April 7, 2025, at the age of 73. ~ William Ruhlmann & Marcy Donelson, Rovi