William Finn

WILLIAM FINN received two Tony Awards—Best Book of a Musical (with James Lapine) and Best Original Score—for Falsettos. He has also written and composed In Trousers, March of the Falsettos, and Falsettoland (Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Lucille Lortel Award and Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting), Romance in Hard Times, A New Brain (Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical), and Elegies: A Song Cycle. Finn wrote the lyrics to Graciela Daniele’s Tango Apasionado (music by the great Astor Piazzolla); with Michael Starobin, the music to Lapine’s version of The Winter’s Tale; and with Vadim Feichtner, the music to Mark Lamos’s production of As You Like It. For television, Finn provided the music and lyrics for the Ace Award-winning HBO cartoon Ira Sleeps Over, Tom Thumb and Thumbelina, Pokey Little Puppy’s First Christmas and, with Ellen Fitzhugh, two Brave Little Toaster cartoons. Finn has written for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker. A graduate of Williams College, where he was awarded the Hutchinson Fellowship for Musical Composition, Finn now teaches a weekly master class at the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theatre Writing. Other projects include Little Miss Sunshine (with James Lapine) and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which won two Tony Awards, ran more than 1,000 performances on Broadway, has been produced nationally and internationally, and is currently one of the most performed musicals in the United States according to Theatre Communications Group. Since 2006, he has been the Artistic Head of the Musical Theatre Lab at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass.