Apr 9
William Finn, Who Gave Eloquent Voice to the AIDS Epidemic with 'Falsettos,' Dies at 73
READ TIME: 3 MIN.
William Finn, the composer/lyricist who was one of the first to give musical voice to the AIDS epidemic, passed away on Monday, the New York Times reports. Finn was 73.
His death was revealed by his longtime partner, Arthur Salvadore, who said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pulmonary fibrosis. For Mr. Finn had contended with neurological issues. He had homes in Williamstown, Mass., and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
"Mr. Finn was widely admired for his clever, complex lyrics, and for the poignant honesty with which he explored character. He was gay and Jewish, and some of his most significant work concerned those communities; in the 1990s, with 'Falsettos,' he was among the first artists to musicalize the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, and his musical 'A New Brain' was inspired by his own life-threatening experience with an arteriovenous malformation," writes the Times.
"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. Bishop was one of the first to see Finn's potential as a theater writer when he first produced his first Marvin musical "In Trousers" at Playwrights Horizons in 1979. It was followed by "March of the Falsettos" (1981) and "Falsettoland" (1991). The trio were directed by James Lapine.
"March of the Falsettos" and "Falsettoland" were paired as "Falsettos" and brought to Broadway in 1992, winning Finn Tony Awards for score and book. The musical follows Marvin, a New York Jewish man who leaves his wife, Trina, and son, Jason, to live with a younger man, Whizzer, when he realizes he's gay, only to lose Whizzer to AIDS.
"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," Mr. Bishop told the Times, "but what he really had was this huge heart – his shows are popular because his talent was beautiful and accessible and warm and heartfelt."
Watch the cast of the revival of "Falsettos" perform at the 2017 Tony Awards.
When 'Falsettos' opened, Frank Rich wrote in the Times: "At this late date, it may be superfluous to praise Mr. Finn's talent as a composer, but one of the virtues of 'Falsettos' is that you take in his whole, wide range in one sitting and appreciate the dramatic uses to which he puts his music, not just the eclecticism of tunes that range from show-biz razzmatazz ('Love Is Blind') to lullabye ('Father to Son') to lush ballads ('Unlikely Lovers'). Neither an opera nor a conventional musical, Mr. Finn's score is full of fine details: A musical signature from Act I will turn up fractured in Act II just as a life cracks up; the notes underlying 'spreading' in an internist's lyric about 'something bad spreading, spreading, spreading round' themselves spread the terror of a still nameless virus that defies the meaning of words."
It was revived on Broadway in 2016. In 1998, Finn wrote the challenging musical "A New Brain "inspired by his own life-threatening experience with an arteriovenous malformation," and in 2003 he wrote "Elegies," a song cycle prompted by the 9/11 attacks about lost loved ones.
Finn, who lived in the Berkshires, formed a working relationship with the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA who, in the summer of 2004, premiered "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" in a school cafeteria. The show transferred off-Broadway to the Second Stage the following year, then to Broadway, and became Finn's biggest success. "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, the president and chief executive of Music Theater International, which licenses it," adds the Times.
"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.'"
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," Mr. Salvadore, his partner of 45 years, said.
Amongst Finn's other projects were 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.
