William Finn, Tony-Winning Composer of Falsettos, A New Brain and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Dies at 73

William Finn, the two-time Tony-winning composer and lyricist known for subversive, bitingly funny and tragic musicals—including Falsettos, A New Brain and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee—has died, his agent confirmed to Broadway.com. No cause of death was given. Finn was 73.

Born in 1952, Finn grew up in Natick, Massachussets. For his bar mitzvah, he received a guitar which he taught himself to play, developing a love of musical theater initially sparked by Mary Martin TV musicals and segments on The Ed Sullivan Show. At eight, he played Nicely Nicely in a production of Guys and Dolls at camp. “I was five years younger than all the rest of the leads so they thought I was an adorable little tyke, which I was,” he said in a 2016 interview for the Lincoln Center Theater blog. He and his siblings would create routines set to songs from the Bye Bye Birdie original cast recording. “I loved every Broadway show, unlike today... I wish I could go back to those times when I was enthralled.”

Especially enthralling to Finn was the work of Stephen Sondheim. “Once I saw Company, I thought, 'That's not a bad way to spend a life,'” he told Backstage. He enrolled to study literature and American civilization at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Sondheim had studied, writing and singing his own musicals on the side. By the time he graduated, Finn had written three musicals, and was awarded the Hutchinson Fellowship for music composition, which Sondheim had also won at Williams.

Relocating to New York—and briefly considering pursuing medicine—Finn first worked as a script reader for the Public Theater but gradually gained notice staging musical plays in his apartment, with the audience seating consisting of chairs borrowed from the synagogue across the street. “I invited the best singers over, and I’d write them little songs. We’d rehearse. I’d cook chicken wings for dinner (the cheapest protein) and we’d sing,” he told the Williams alumni magazine The Williams Record.

“People orbited him,” Chip Zien, who originated the role of Mendel in Falsettos on Broadway, told The New York Times. “I think they thought he had magical powers of songwriting.”

On the strength of these apartment performances, Finn was invited to participate in the inaugural season of the musical theater lab at Playwrights Horizons, who subsequently commissioned more work from him. Of March of the Falsettos (1981)—the second in a trilogy of musicals centered around the character Marvin (beginning with the 1979 musical In Trousers)—Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, “The songs are so fresh that the show is only a few bars old before one feels the unmistakable, revivifying charge of pure talent.”

Nine years later, again for Playwrights Horizons, Finn completed the trilogy with Falsettoland, which, combined with March of the Falsettos, turned into Falsettos. The show opened on Broadway in 1992 (his second Broadway credit after penning the lyrics to the short-lived musical Dangerous Games) and ran for 486 performances, winning the Tony Award for Best Original Score as well as for Best Book of a Musical. A critically acclaimed revival opened in 2016 and garnered five Tony nominations.

The same year as Falsettos' Broadway premiere, Finn was rushed to the hospital suffering deteriorating vision, dizziness and partial paralysis. He endured the ensuing medical ordeal listening to Leonard Bernstein's ''Make Our Garden Grow'' over and over. In September, he underwent surgery to treat arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, in his brain stem.

After the treatment, Finn experienced what he described as unprecedented calm and contentment. “This was the time that I felt I had the new brain,” he said. “A new way of thinking. Simplifying, not being cynical.” With his Falsettos collaborator James Lapine, Finn penned A New Brain about the experience, the show premiering off-Broadway in 1998.

Following his song cycle Elegies, which ran off-Broadway in 2003, Finn would have further success on Broadway with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005). While continuing to create his own work, including revues and a musical adaptation of Little Miss Sunshine, Finn increasingly invested his energies in mentoring young writers. He co-founded and led, as artistic producer, Barrington Stage Company’s Musical Theatre Lab, an incubator for new musicals, and was a faculty member at the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theater Writing. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2024.

“What’s interesting is seeing the dirty beginnings of a real talent,” Finn told The Boston Globe in 2016. “I love everyone’s early voice. It’s a person screaming to be heard.’’ Asked about his legacy in the same interview, Finn responded, “In 20 years, hopefully you will be able to look back and see the list of writers we had and know how special they were.’’

"He tried to help us break out of mannerisms and clichés—relentlessly pushing us to find whatever was most ‘alive' in our writing," said Maybe Happy Ending composer Will Aronson, who studied under Finn at NYU. "He had a tremendous impact on my work. I’ll be forever grateful."

Finn is survived by his partner Arthur Salvadore.