Tony Winner William Finn Has Died at 73

Two time Tony winner William Finn died April 7 following a long illness, �뵺�� has confirmed via a press representative. He was 73.

Born and raised in Massachusetts in conservative Judaism, Mr. Finn was inspired to write his first play in Hebrew School. He attended Williams College, first as a guitar major before transitioning to the wider music major, inadvertently following in the footsteps of one of his mentors from afar, Stephen Sondheim, who had also attended Williams College and received the same Hutchinson Fellowship.

Mr. Finn became a heavily autobiographical musical theatre writer, folding his experiences as a gay Jewish man with a brain stem malformation into some of his most lauded work. His first show, Sizzle, was produced at Williams College in 1971, making it the first original musical to be produced on the campus since Sondheim's era. The coming of age musical about college students played to packed houses, kickstarting Mr. Finn's self confidence as he ventured into the artistic experience that would define his future fame.

He next composed a trilogy of short musicals which would become his first professional calling card, and intended for the Off-Broadway market. Titled In Trousers, March of the Falsettos, and Falsettoland, all chronicle the story of a gay man named Marvin, his lover Whizzer, Marvin’s ex-wife Trina, their son Jason, and their extended family from the early ��80s through the early days of the AIDS crisis. The three musicals were an unexpected documentation of the encroaching danger of the AIDS crisis, with In Trousers having been written and developed in the late 1970s before the epidemic was known, March of the Falsettos written in 1981 before the scale of the epidemic was known, and Falsettoland written in 1990, when the devastation was on their doorstep.

While In Trousers was initially panned, each successive revision and revisit to Marvin's world gained greater and greater acclaim. The last two installments, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, were directed by James Lapine, and eventually combined into what is now known as Falsettos. Opening on Broadway at the John Golden Theater April 29, 1992, Falsettos is considered one of the great theatrical works about the AIDS crisis, running for 486 performances and picking up seven nominations at the Tony Awards. Mr. Finn won the Tony Award for Best Original Score, as well as the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, sharing the latter with Lapine. A critically acclaimed revival played Broadway in 2016, taking in five nominations at the Tony Awards, including Best Revival. A filmed performance has since been commercially released and broadcast on PBS.

It is, however, of note that Falsettos was not Mr. Finn's Broadway debut, as is most often assumed. The short lived musical, Dangerous Games, ran for only four performances at the Nederlander Theatre in 1989. The show was notably one of the only times where Mr. Finn collaborated with another artist on the score of a show, rather than producing both the music and lyrics himself: Dangerous Games featured music by Astor Piazzolla to accompany Mr. Finn's lyrics.

Mr. Finn and Lapine would again collaborate in 1998, developing a work Mr. Finn had loosely based on his near-death experience following brain surgery. A New Brain's main character Gordo is a thinly veiled stand-in for Mr. Finn himself, as a man struggling with a potentially terminal arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Mr. Finn's longtime partner, Arthur Salvadore, was represented in the form of Roger Delli-Bovi, and Mr. Finn's mother is also present in the piece. The musical premiered Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater, winning the 1999 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical.

The writer-director duo's third cult classic musical would come in the form of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he wrote both music and lyrics, with a book by Rachel Sheinkin. The show was first workshopped at Barrington Stage Company, where Mr. Finn later created the Musical Theatre Lab (MTL), one of the most beloved developmental programs for emerging musical theatre writers striving to create new works. The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee won two Tony Awards in 2005- Best Book of a Musical and Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Dan Fogler. The show received four additional Tony nominations, including Best Musical, Best Direction for Lapine, Best Original Score for Mr. Finn, and Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Celia Keenan-Bolger.

In addition to these three musicals, Mr. Finn has produced three musical revues: Infinite Joy, Elegies: A Song Cycle, and Make Me a Song.

Mr. Finn and Lapine's fourth musical, Little Miss Sunshine, premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in California in 2011. The show played Off Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre in 2013. His long-developed adaptation of the play The Royal Family by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, The Royal Family of Broadway, was finally staged at Barrington in 2018. Featuring a book by Sheinkin, the show follows a girl from a family of great Broadway actors who contemplates leaving show business altogether.

He was a member of the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theater Writing faculty, where he influenced hundreds of early career composers, lyricists, and book writers. He is survived by his life partner, Arthur Salvadore.