William Finn
William Alan Finn (February 28, 1952 – April 7, 2025) was an American composer, lyricist, and book writer for musical theatre. He was best known for Falsettos (1992), for which he won the Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical (the latter shared with James Lapine); A New Brain (1998), a semi-autobiographical musical drawn from his own medical crisis; and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), which received six Tony nominations and won two, for Best Book and Best Featured Actor. Although Falsettos is often described as his Broadway debut, Finn had first reached Broadway three years earlier as lyricist for the short-lived Dangerous Games (1989). Over his career Finn also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards, and two Outer Critics Circle Awards, for Falsettoland (1991) and A New Brain (1999), and in 2024 was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Finn's work frequently drew on his own life as a gay, Jewish man, and on themes of family, illness, and loss. He was a longtime faculty member of New York University's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, serving as an adjunct assistant professor there from 1999 to 2019, and, from 2006, artistic head of the Musical Theatre Lab at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he mentored a generation of younger musical theatre writers.
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