William “Bill” Finn, the Tony Award-winning writer and composer of works like “Falsettos” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” died Monday. He was 73.
No cause of death was announced, but Finn was described by Playbill as having endured a long illness.
His literary agent, Ron Gwiazda, confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter.
Finn won best original score and best book at the 1992 Tony Awards for “Falsettos,” a musical drama about a family and the AIDS crisis. A 2016 revival starred Andrew Rannells.
“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” another musical, notched six Tony nominations after its 2005 Broadway debut and counted Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Dan Fogler, who won the best featured actor in a musical Tony, among its cast.
Finn was born Feb. 28, 1952 in Boston. A fan of musical theater since childhood, he attended Williams College, following in the footsteps of his idol Stephen Sondheim.
“I loved every Broadway show, unlike today… I wish I could go back to those times when I was enthralled,” he told the Lincoln Center Theater blog in a 2016 interview.
“Once I saw “Company,” I thought, ‘That’s not a bad way to spend a life,’” he told Backstage in 2019.
“Sizzle,” his first show, became the first original musical to run at Williams since Sondheim’s time as a student there.
His trilogy of “In Trousers,” “March of the Falsettos,” and “Falsettoland,” which were released over a decade, chronicled a family dealing with divorce and AIDS. The final two installments were later combined into “Falsettos.”
The show opened at the John Golden Theater April 29, 1992 and ran for 486 performances. It nabbed seven Tony nominations and two wins for Finn’s score and book, which he co-wrote with director James Lapine.
The revival received five nominations and was filmed and broadcast by PBS.
He re-teamed with his “Falsettos” collaborator Lapine for 1998’s “A New Brain,” a semi-autobiographical musical about Finn’s near-death experience following brain surgery to treat arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in his brain stem.
The two also adapted “Little Miss Sunshine” for the stage.
In addition to his creative work, Finn created the Musical Theatre Lab at Barrington Stage Company and was a member of the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theater Writing faculty.
He is survived by partner Arthur Salvadore.
