William Finn

Diagnoses

Vocation

Notable

American playwright, and composer, he won two Tony awards in 1992 for his musical play "Falsettos." The awards were given for Best Book (which he wrote with James Lapine) and Best Original Score. Finn graduated from Williams College, where he was awarded the Hutchinson Fellowship in Musical Composition. His plays often are about homosexuality and family relationships. His trilogy about his character Marvin, a bi-sexual who leaves his wife for a man, begins with "In Trousers," first shown in 1979. It won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award and was followed two years later in 1981 by "March of the Falsettos" which won an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Musical as well as another L.A. Drama Critics Award. The third play of the trilogy, "Falsettoland," was released in 1990 and was the recipient of two Drama Desk Awards and Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical. In the intervening years, he wrote and staged additional plays and in 1984 won a Guggenheim Fellowship. "March of the Falsettos" and "Falsettoland," both originally one-act plays were combined into his Tony-award winning "Falsettos," which opened on Broadway on April 29, 1992. Starting in the early 1990s, he began writing songs for children's books and musicals. Diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor upon which surgery was nevertheless performed successfully, he wrote the semi-autobiographical "A New Brain." The play made its stage debut in New York on June 18, 1998, and won The Outer Critics Circle Award for the best off-Broadway musical of the season. In addition to composing and writing plays and music, he has taught master classes at NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Link to Wikipedia biography