The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Play)

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    The Loose Screws, Hot Flames and Infinite Joy of William Finn

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    The composer and lyricist of “A New Brain,” “Falsettos” and other shows answered the pains of life with jaunty songs. He died this week at 73.When I met William Finn in 2005, at work on “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” he was seated in his office in front of what looked like a trash heap but might have been a desk. On a couch nearby, one of his collaborators sank slowly beneath a rising tide of detritus; when she spoke, Finn kept overwhelming her too. Bearlike and blustery, garrulous and appetitive, he grabbed at every idea floating around the room, just as he grabbed at insane rhymes and jangly melodies in writing his sometimes hilarious, sometimes haunting (sometimes both) songs.The opportunistic lyrics were what first attracted me. By the time of “Spelling Bee,” Finn, who died Monday at the age of 73, had already made a name for himself with the “Falsettos” trilogy, his take on a family (and thus a society) shattered by disease and disaffection in the early years of AIDS. Yet despite the sadness of that story (the book is by Finn and James Lapine), the melodies are mostly jaunty and the words outrageously playful. In the show’s opening number he rhymes “four Jews” with “loose screws.”Listen to a selection of Finn’s songs on Spotify:We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      William Finn, Tony-Winning Composer for ‘Falsettos,’ Dies at 73

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      An acclaimed musical theater writer, he won for both his score and his book and later had a huge hit with “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”William Finn, a witty, cerebral and psychologically perceptive musical theater writer who won two Tony Awards for “Falsettos” and had an enduringly popular hit with “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” died on Monday in Bennington, Vt. He was 73.His longtime partner, Arthur Salvadore, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pulmonary fibrosis, following years in which 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.“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. He presented seven of Mr. Finn’s shows, starting at Playwrights Horizons in the late 1970s and continuing at Lincoln Center.“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 added, “but what he really had was this huge heart — his shows are popular because his talent was beautiful and accessible and warm and heartfelt.”Mr. Finn played varying roles across his career, as a composer, a lyricist and sometime librettist. His songs often feature “a wordy introspective urbanity,” as Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times in 2003. In “A New Brain,” Mr. Finn seemed to distill his passion for the art form, writing, “Heart and music keep us all alive.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More