William Finn, composer of Falsettos and Spelling Bee, has died aged 73

Tony Award-winning composer William Finn died on 7 April following a long illness. He was 73.

Finn made his professional debut as a composer in 1979 with the one-act musical In Trousers, about a closeted gay man named Marvin and his struggle to come to terms with both his identity and family responsibility. A sequel, March of the Falsettos, followed in 1981. Then a third installment, Falsettoland, arrived in 1990, at the AIDS crisis was approaching its worst years. All three debuted off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons.

Under the direction of James Lapine (who also collaborated on the book), a combination of the last two works premiered on Broadway in 1992 under the title Falsettos. It was the first Broadway musical to seriously confront AIDS. Finn won the Tony Awards that year for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical. The show was revived on Broadway in 2016, again directed by Lapine.

Embracing the adage “write what you know,” Finn veered toward the autobiographical, never more so than in his 1998 off-Broadway musical A New Brain, which was inspired by his own arteriovenous malformation and near-death experience following brain surgery. Overflowing with Finn’s signature lyrical honesty and acerbic wit, the original production featured Mary Testa as a homeless panhandler singing the lyric, “I don’t ask for hugs / Just need money to buy more drugs / And if you folks pay, I’ll go away.”

Finn returned to Broadway in 2005 with the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, about a group of misfit children in a spelling competition. The show was nominated for six Tony Awards and won two (for featured actor Dan Fogler and Rachel Sheinkin’s book). It led our sister site TheaterMania’s critic, David Finkle, to declare, “The American musical comedy — with equal emphasis on the ‘musical’ part and the ‘comedy’ part — is alive and well.” The show has gone on to become a community theatre staple in the UUS.

The composer reunited with director James Lapine for a musical adaptation of the film Little Miss Sunshine, which debuted at La Jolla Playhouse in 2011 and played off-Broadway at Second Stage in 2013.

His final musical, The Royal Family of Broadway, was a musical adaptation of the 1927 Kaufman and Ferber play The Royal Family, and once again featured a book by Rachel Sheinkin. It debuted at Barrington Stage Company in 2018.

In addition to his book musicals, Finn composed two revues: Infinite Joy in 2000 and Make Me a Song in 2006. He also composed the song cycle Elegies in response to the September 11th attacks, with most of the songs deeply personal tributes to dead friends. That show debuted at Lincoln Center Theater in 2003 and, as always, captures Finn’s special combination of humour and heartbreak.

Finn was a graduate of Williams College. He was also a member of the faculty of the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theater Writing, where he influenced a generation of aspiring composers. He is survived by his longtime partner, Arthur Salvadore.