William Finn, Tony-winning writer of queer, Jewish musicals dies at 73

By pj pigs
April 8, 2025

William Finn, the Tony-winning musical theater composer and lyricist, who wrote offbeat odes to Jewish and queer identity, has died at 73. Playbill reported his death after a long illness.

Known for musicals like The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and A New Brain, which documented a health crisis, Finn rose to prominence in 1992 with Falsettos, a portrait of a dysfunctional family that opens with the number “Four Jews in a Room Bitching” and culminates in a bar mitzvah.

Finn was born Feb. 28, 1952 and grew up in Natick, Massachusetts. He was raised Conservative and his rabbi was Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In a 2016 interview with Tablet, Finn recalled that he wrote his first play in Hebrew.

“I have no idea what it was about. But it was horrible, I guarantee it,” Finn said. “I couldn’t write plays, and I couldn’t really speak Hebrew, so how good could it be?” For his bar mitzvah, he was gifted a guitar and taught himself to play. He moved to piano when he went to college at Williams.

Finn recalled in a 2004 interview with Playbill that, while he always wrote songs, it took him time to find his voice, but when he did it was, largely “a very distinct New York Jewish gay voice.”

In his early career in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Finn wrote a trilogy of one-act musicals centered on Marvin, a self-absorbed weatherman who leaves his wife to be with a man (his ex shacks up with his psychiatrist) and vies to maintain a “tight-knit family” within their unconventional arrangement. Falsettos combined the three plays, with the help of Finn’s collaborator James Lapine.

When it won the Tony for Best Original Score, Finn asked the audience to stop applauding: “Don’t do this, you’re making my mother cry in Boston.”

Shortly after accepting the Tony for best score and best book, Finn began having trouble with his vision. Finn was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation and nearly died having brain surgery.

The experience prompted the semi-autobiographical musical A New Brain, written with Lapine, which debuted Off-Broadway in 1998.

Finn returned once more  to Broadway in 2005 with his musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a quirky comedy much beloved by community theaters and middle and high schools.

Finn’s other musicals included the meditation on death and loss, Elegies, which addressed both the AIDS crisis and, in a song called “Passover,” a Seder from his memory, peopled with departed loved ones.

Its lyrics perfectly embody the Jewish eccentricity Finn was such a wizard at creating, with Cousin Gary reading porn and men wearing Acapulco Beach Club bandanas instead of kippot.

“We are Jews from like the first 5,000 years,” the song goes, “Laughing through our tears. Joyous, vulgar, anything goes.”