Heart & Music
- Anastasia Stanmeyer
- Jun 26
- 20 min read
A LOOK INTO THE LIFE OF AMERICAN COMPOSER AND LYRICIST WILLIAM FINN
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
Niko Tsakalakos’ voice falters. He seems at a loss for words as we talk about his mentor, William Finn. “Bill impacted people's lives profoundly,” says the composer-lyricist of Fall Springs and Pool Boy, both Barrington Stage Company premieres, thanks especially to Finn.
Finn—a “larger-than-life personality,” as Barrington Stage’s former artistic director Julie Boyd so aptly puts it—impacted the lives of so many people creating American musicals.
It’s no exaggeration to state that Finn’s effect has been profound—some say on par with Stephen Sondheim, the very person Finn idolized from an early age. Finn, who passed away on April 7, 2025, at the age of 73, made the Berkshires his creative home base, developing his own works here and supporting other creatives. The Tony® Award-winning composer and lyricist shared his passion, compassion, and support of developing musicals with countless other lyricists, composers, directors, and writers.
“He wanted to nurture young writers,” says Alan Paul, Barrington Stage’s Artistic Director. “Julie gave him a sandbox to do that.”
Finn and Boyd established Barrington’s Musical Theatre Lab where, under his mentorship, 12 world premiere musicals and seven workshops were produced. Finn also came up with the idea of spotlighting and celebrating young writers with “Songs by Ridiculously Talented Composers and Lyricists You Probably Don’t Know But Should,” a Labor Day weekend concert series that became a hallmark of Barrington’s Musical Theatre Lab for a number of years. The collaboration between Finn and Boyd in creating a space where musicals were developed (and sometimes premiered) was foundational to the theater that was still evolving.
In its first 11 years, Barrington Stage Company (BSC) made due with various performance spaces until it found a permanent home. BSC operated from rented space at the Consolati Performing Arts Center at Mount Everett High School in Sheffield, where the auditorium was used as their Mainstage space and two cafeterias as makeshift theaters. (Finn’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which became a runaway hit on Broadway and garnered two Tony® Awards, premiered in one of them.) Finn’s Elegies: A Song Cycle was staged in 2005 at the Mahaiwe theater in Great Barrington, which followed its Lincoln Center production in 2003.
BSC has, of course, grown since then. In July 2005, the theater company purchased a 1912 vaudeville theater in downtown Pittsfield, which became the 520-seat, state-of-the art Boyd-Quinson Stage. In 2012, the company acquired the former V.F.W. building in Pittsfield, three blocks from the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage. The building, now called the Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center, includes the 136-seat St. Germain Stage and Mr. Finn’s Cabaret, a 99-seat cabaret space in the lower level of the building.
In researching this article, everyone I spoke to who knew Finn had many stories to tell—about his big heart, his sense of humor, his jaggedness and blatant honesty that were singularly Finn. I met him a few times through the years in social settings and last caught a glimpse of him at the opening of the revival of A New Brain in 2023 at Barrington Stage, a co-production with Williamstown Theatre Festival. Paul called him out on opening night. The audience was stunned to see that Finn was sitting amongst them and was brought to their feet in applause. It was to be the last staging of a Finn musical in the Berkshires.
Barrington Stage’s 2025 summer season is dedicated to Finn, and the public is invited to a “Celebration of William Finn” on Tuesday, August 19, which will include many of the writers he mentored in Barrington Stage's Musical Theatre Lab, as well as Broadway artists performing his work. On September 4 and 5 at Mr. Finn’s Cabaret, Broadway star Alysha Umphress will return for So Far, an evening of song and stories, highlighting her countless summers at Barrington and paying tribute to her longtime mentor.
“Bill truly gave a lot of young artists their first professional opportunities,” says Grammy®-nominated Nathan Tysen, lyricist for the Broadway stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, among many other musicals. “There’s a whole group of us that have careers because of Bill Finn.”
Mickey and Judy Putting on a Show … Stoned
Finn grew up in Natick, Massachusetts, in a conservative Jewish household. He wrote his first musical, Sizzle, while still a student at Williams College. It was produced in 1971. The piece was a coming-of-age story about college students, with Finn writing the music and lyrics and his friend Charlie Rubin writing the libretto. While at Williams, Finn wrote two other musicals and studied the work of Stephen Sondheim, who had also attended the school. Sondheim received Williams College’s Hutchinson Fellowship in Musical Composition. Finn went on to win the same award and, like Sondheim, found a longtime friend and collaborator in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and three-time Tony® Award-winning director/writer James Lapine.
Of course, Finn met Lapine long before the accolades.
Early in his career, Lapine wrote a play, Table Settings, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons. Finn, who was also relatively new to New York, saw the play and was eager to meet Lapine. (“I thought it was like a musical from the beginning,” Finn told me during a phone conversation in 2023.)
André Bishop, who ran Playwrights Horizons at the time, thought the two men would work well together, so he introduced them. Lapine hadn’t seen any of Finn’s work, but Finn (then 26 years old) was insistent that Lapine work with him. “When Bill wanted something, he would make it clear to you that he wanted it, and you should do it,” says Lapine. “I was barely in the theater myself at the time. I thought, well, if this guy wants to collaborate, let's see what we can do. And that was that.”
Together, Finn and Lapine created March of the Falsettos, the second in Finn’s “Marvin Trilogy.” (The first, Finn’s one-act musical In Trousers, had already been staged.)
“It was really Mickey and Judy putting on a show … stoned,” recalls Lapine. “We really worked on our feet on that show. We both were young and stupid and worked fast, and it was a great experience.”
Falsettoland followed in 1990, also premiering at Playwrights Horizons.
March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, both sung-through musicals, were combined to create Falsettos. The story centers around Marvin, who has left his wife to be with a male lover, Whizzer, and struggles to keep his family together. Truly groundbreaking, the musical tackled many then-taboo topics, including homosexuality, religious identity, mental health, unconventional family structure, and AIDS. Falsettos premiered on Broadway in 1992, winning Lapine and Finn Tony® Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score.
After Falsettos, Lapine and Finn collaborated in various capacities on A New Brain (which premiered at Lincoln Center in 1998); The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (which transferred from Barrington Stage to Broadway); Little Miss Sunshine (which premiered in 2011 at the La Jolla Playhouse in California before moving to New York’s Second Stage), and The Royal Family of Broadway, the last production Finn premiered at Barrington Stage Company.
I asked Finn a few years back what made him and Lapine such a good team. “He's very full of ideas, so I find that reassuring, always. I feel connected to him. I have learned that I can always trust him.”
How did their creative process work?
To begin with, Lapine is a self-described index card king. He keeps his ideas on index cards pinned to a corkboard. Lapine explained it to me: “Bill and I would talk about a song, and then I'd make a little card, and then we'd stick it on the board. Eventually, we would start rearranging the cards, and then we would say, ‘Well, what's our opening gonna be?’ or ‘How do we get to here from there?’ It was kind of a peculiar way to work, but for us, it was kind of great. I'm more visual than Bill. I had to see structure. Particularly with March of the Falsettos, we’d get to a point where we would say, ‘That person can't sing another song and another song and another song,’ so we had to start figuring out how to get the rhythm of the show with the characters. And then we would talk about what so-and-so would sing about, or how would they get this information. It was kind of freewheeling like that. Sometimes, I would just stage something without anything, and sometimes he would write music with no lyrics, or dummy lyrics, and he would say to me, ‘Well, what are they going to sing about?’ And then I would rattle off ten ideas, and he'd go off and choose five of them, or make one or two of his own. That's why he liked working with me, because he said I was never dry. I always had an idea.”
Finn liked musicals that are sung through, like the “Marvin Trilogy” and A New Brain.
“Bill sort of vomited out the stuff, and then he cleaned up the messes, which is how I always thought about it,” says Lapine. “I totally get that …. You go on instinct and then put it down.”
Although Finn and Sondheim were known to have very different creative processes, both were committed to working with younger people and inspiring them. Bill was untempered by whatever came flying out of his head and mouth. Sondheim was more classically trained in both lyrics and music. Finn didn’t write down the music he created; he played music, and then it was written down for him. “Every little dotted dot was on the sheet music before Stephen even let you hear it,” says Lapine, who would bounce back and forth between projects with Finn and Sondheim. He equally enjoyed working with both theater giants. “Their methodology was so different, but their imaginations were so, I guess you would say, limitless.”
André Bishop
After 33 years as Artistic Director and Producing Artistic Director of Lincoln Center Theater, André Bishop is retiring on June 30, 2025. He has produced over 80 Broadway plays and musicals and has won numerous Tony® Awards. When I talked with him, he was beginning to plan a private gathering on June 17 in memory of William Finn, working together with Lapine; theater and film producer David Stone; and Ira Weitzman, Mindich Musical Theatre Producer at Lincoln Center Theater. Fittingly, it was to be the last event Bishop organized at Lincoln Center.
Bishop recounted his first meeting with Finn in late 1977: Somebody called and told him about Finn, who then invited Bishop to a presentation of his work in his apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. Bishop explained that Finn was quite persuasive on the phone, so he went to the performance. It started very late at night. (Finn was waiting for people to show up.) Chairs were set up in the living room, as if it were a small theater. Finn’s mother served scrambled eggs to all the guests. And that was Bishop’s introduction to In Trousers.
“Bill was singing in it, as well,” recalls Bishop, who was the Artistic Director at Playwrights Horizons at the time. “I remember going away thinking, this is an overpowering talent that kind of just came out at you—probably partly because we were in a small living room. But I just thought, this man’s got a really individual voice and a very strong talent. It was very clear from the very start. That was how I first met him.”
In Trousers subsequently had a 1978 run at Playwrights Horizons’ 74-seat upstairs theater, with Finn playing the role of Marvin. The next year, the piece was done at Playwrights’ larger, downstairs space.
Finn continued writing about the Marvin character, initially calling March of the Falsettos “The Pettiness of Misogyny.” Then it became, “Four Jews in a Room Bitching.” Bishop felt Finn needed support. Enter Lapine. “He needed someone else to come in, organize him, and really make a show out of what was just a series of loosely connected songs,” says Bishop. “That was what happened with March of the Falsettos.”
Finn not only had the support of Bishop, but also Weitzman, then Director of the Musical Theater Program at Playwrights. “It was a very exciting time for all of us who worked on the show,” says Bishop. “Playwrights Horizons was still very young in its development as a theater. We weren't expecting anything that happened to happen. It was one of those times—especially when you're young, if you're lucky—where the world seemed ahead of all of us. And it certainly seemed ahead of Bill.”
Bishop took over as artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater in 1992, and Weitzman moved with him. They premiered A New Brain in 1998 and Elegies: A Song Cycle in 2003. Falsettos was revived in 2016 on Broadway and was nominated for five Tony® Awards.
“Bill had great wit and great verbal dexterity, combined with a very strong melodic sense,” says Bishop. “People think a lot of his songs are funny and verbally complicated. But, in fact, I think his best songs are his romantic, heartfelt ballads. I think that's where he really excelled, where he had this sort of poetic way with words and a lovely, lovely, warm and tender sense of melody.”
Bishop presented Finn when he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in November 2024. That was the last time he saw his old friend. “He was such an individual talent. His voice was so clearly a unique one, an idiosyncratic one …. He was special in a field of a lot of very talented people.”
Mary Testa
Finn’s musicals were not his only success stories; he took great pride in new talents he discovered and supported. Soon after graduating from Williams College, he met Mary Testa at a University of Rhode Island musical production of Antigone in the mid-1970s. “He said, ‘I want that girl with the big voice and the big hair,’” recalls Testa. She moved to New York in 1979 and immediately started working with Finn, debuting as Miss Goldberg in his first Off Broadway musical, In Trousers, at Playwrights Horizons.
“In doing his first show, I just knew he had an individual voice and created the kind of work and the kind of music that I wanted to sing and wanted to be a part of,” says Testa, a three-time Tony® Award nominee. “I think Bill just appreciated my talent, as I appreciated his. I know something to me is genius when it sort of hits me in my gut, and his music always did that for me.”
The next piece she worked on with him was March of the Falsettos. When they were workshopping the musical at Hartford Stage, Testa received an offer for her first Broadway show and was faced with making a choice between sticking with the workshop (which paid $75 a week) or performing in her first Broadway show (which paid $400 a week). “It was very painful for me, and it was very painful for Bill,” recalls Testa, who chose the Broadway musical. “He didn't speak to me for a year after that.” They both subsequently realized that her character in In Trousers had no place in March of the Falsettos. A year later, they were friends again.
In 1992, just three weeks after winning two Tony® Awards for Falsettos, Finn collapsed in midtown Manhattan. He was hospitalized and diagnosed with an Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM), a tangle of blood vessels in his brain. The experience became the inspiration for his 1998 Off Broadway musical A New Brain. Testa, who was at his hospital bedside when he was ill, later played the character of the homeless woman in the original Lincoln Center Theater cast.
Twenty-five years on, Alan Paul at Barrington Stage asked her to play the mother in the 2023 revival of A New Brain on the Boyd-Quinson Stage, in association with Williamstown Theatre Festival. The director was Joe Calarco, and Vadim Feichtner was the musical director.
“I was just proud to be a part of it. I knew Bill's mom, and he loved his mother more than anything in the world,” says Testa. “My hair is very big and curly. She was a very put together woman with blonde hair. So I had this blonde wig with straight hair. It just helped me feel closer to Bill's mom, even though I look nothing like her.”
The following year, Testa received the 2024 William Finn Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre. The last time she spoke to Finn was on his birthday, February 28, 2025.
“He wanted to know if I’d made money on A New Brain. I said that I was making my normal regional theater salary,” she says, laughing. At the end of the conversation, she said, “Bill, I love you.” He responded, “Thank you.” Testa laughs again. “It was typical Bill. He could be a big asshole. He wasn't the easiest guy always. But I never doubted his love for me.”
His students
Niko Tsakalakos first met Finn when he took his class at NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. He was asked by Finn to assist him in the summer between his first and second year at NYU.
“It was just an amazing turning point in my life, for him to invite me to assist him at Barrington Stage’s Musical Theatre Lab,” Tsakalakos recalls. He drove Finn around and often told him stories about working as a hotel pool boy the previous summer.
“I just had these crazy stories of this larger-than-life world at the Hotel Bel Air with the celebrities and all the interactions I was having,” says Tsakalakos. “I was just talking about it while I was driving. We stopped at a light once, and Bill turned and said, ‘Niko, that's what you should be writing about.’”
Finn encouraged Tsakalakos to tap into his own experiences, to find a voice for a character in a way that was honest. That’s where Pool Boy emerged. It was developed at the BSC Musical Theatre Lab, followed by a world premiere at Barrington Stage in 2010. That was later followed by Fall Springs, which also was developed in the Musical Theatre Lab and premiered at Barrington Stage in 2019.
“Being with Bill changed the trajectory of my life,” says Tsakalakos. “I know that he's done that for so many students, artists, composers, actors. Anyone he collaborated with. He was just a force.”
Nathan Tysen first heard Falsettos in 1997, and that’s when he realized what musical theater could be—personal, quirky, funny, heartfelt and catchy. “It sounded so fresh and so new,” says Tysen. A New Brain came out while Tysen was in college, and he memorized that score. “Basically, I knew Bill’s whole catalogue by the time I went to NYU grad school in 1999.”
In his second year at NYU, the graduate students had to write a musical thesis. The first week, Tysen and Chris Miller pitched two or three different ideas for feedback. Finn didn’t mince words if he didn’t think the idea was good, Tysen says.
“‘DON’T DO THAT,’ he said. ‘That is a horrible idea. I promise you, come May, you're gonna say, ‘Why the fuck did I decide to make this into a musical?’ The people who didn't listen to him, he just crossed his arms and said, ‘I told you, it's not a good idea. You should have listened.’ So, we kind of always trusted that he was our true north, and we would rewrite when he told us to rewrite.”
Bill reminded his students that if they were going to spend all this time working on a show, they should make sure it was a viable idea and something that somebody would buy a ticket to.
Several years later, Finn asked Miller what they were going to do with their musical thesis, The Burnt Part Boys. The songwriting team told their mentor that they were thinking about bringing on someone to rewrite it. “Bill said, ‘Sing me some of the songs. Let me see what you got.’ So we went to his apartment on the Upper West Side, and his only piano was in the bedroom, and there were no seats anywhere,” says Tysen, laughing. “He laid on the bed, and he was, like, ‘Show me what you got.’ It was a dog-and-pony show for Bill Finn in his bedroom. We sang a handful of songs, and we told him what we wanted to do for the second act. He said, ‘Let's do it. I'm gonna give you a production this summer!’”
The BSC Theatre Lab was the perfect storm with Finn, Boyd, and the Berkshire audience eager to witness new works. “It felt like a safe space,” says Tysen. “A lot of that had to do with Bill and Julie allowing us to create, and to fail, and to try new things. They wanted us to put in new songs during previews. Finn was at the heart of it. He was also always pushing us to make it great. We never half-assed anything, because we wanted to make Bill proud.”
They wrote a second act for The Burnt Part Boys and performed the musical in the
basement of the Pittsfield Library. In the pit with a pianist, Miller played the guitar and Tysen played the harmonica. The eight-person show was a big hit and became their first Off Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons.
Since then, Tysen’s Broadway musical credits include Tuck Everlasting, The Great Gatsby, Paradise Square, and Amélie.
Vadim Feichtner—who was the musical director of The Burnt Part Boys, as well as the pianist for the cast recording—was Finn’s longtime musical director. His credits include The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and the revival of Falsettos on Broadway, as well as the off-Broadway production of Little Miss Sunshine. Finn was Feichtner’s mentor, collaborator, and great friend. “He put me in the world far earlier than I should have been,” says Feichtner. “He made the world so much smaller and made everything seem so attainable.”
Feichtner describes Finn as a sort of mad scientist. “If you saw his scrawl, his handwriting was a little crazy. He would write the chord symbols on the page, and then he would write the melody, just the notes, like A, B, whatever, and they would go off in all directions on the page. It looked like madness. And then when he sang it, it was kind of madness. But then it would eventually hit the page, and then a great singer comes and does it, and you're like, ‘Oh, wow, that's the greatest song I've ever heard!’”
Feichtner was one of the lucky handful who would write Finn’s music down on paper, along with Michael Starobin, Jason Robert Brown, and Carmel Dean. “My phone would ring. He would say, ‘Vadim, you’ve got to come over. Hurry! You’ve got to come over!’ I'd run over with a tape recorder, and he would sit and play it a bunch of times. And then I’d get it on paper.”
Barrington Stage’s past and present artistic directors
In 2002, Barrington Stage Company’s season included Falsettos. Feichtner was the musical director for the production and was holding rehearsals in the cafeteria at Mount Everett High School. Finn—who was unfamiliar with BSC at the time—called and asked if it was good. Feichtner assured him that it was. When the director, Robert Giroux, caught wind that Finn and his partner were renting a house a half hour away, he invited him to a rehearsal. “The first act of Falsettos is so experimental,” says Feichtner. “He was really jazzed that Barrington got it right.”
“I joke that Bill came to rehearsal, and he never left,” says Boyd. “He loved what we were doing, and he kept on coming back.”
The next summer, Boyd asked Finn what projects he had going on. He said his good friend Chip Zien was working on a one-person show entitled, Death in Ashtabula. Finn asked for a space to work on it and then a test audience. Boyd made the space, and they held two readings that year.
That fall, Boyd called Finn again and asked if he had anything in the works. “He said, ‘Yes, I am. I happen to be working on something about a spelling bee,’ and he gave me the background,” says Boyd. He said he had already written a few songs, and she said she’d love to hear them and to make a date. “He goes, ‘Well, how about right now?’” They both had places on the Upper West Side, so she told him to come over. “He played the two and a half songs for me, and I just knew it was going to be a hit.”
Without hesitation, Boyd agreed to his request for a developmental workshop. “Oftentimes in theater, you have to make quick decisions. If somebody like Bill offers you something, you can’t wait two and a half weeks and think about it.” She asked if $20,000 would be enough. He said, “Yes.” The following week, Finn called and said he needed a bit more money for a musical arranger. They settled on a number, and Boyd called a donor who agreed to support the musical’s development. So, a group of young artists from New York came to the Berkshires in the dead of winter to begin work on it, including Finn’s former NYU student Rachel Sheinkin, who wrote the book, and Feichtner as the musical director.
They worked on it for a couple of weeks and then did a weekend of performances. They worked on it again and did another weekend of performances.
“Bill was sitting next to me and he kept saying, ‘I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if it's going to work,’” says Boyd. “I said, ’It's going to work. I'm telling you, it's funny.’ The audience started laughing from the very beginning, and they didn't stop.”
BSC was able to get the underwriting to do the production that summer from a friend of Finn’s, David Stone. He said he would give the money in exchange for the rights to take it to Broadway, if it worked. In July 2004, six months after the winter workshop, they did the musical in Mount Everett High School’s cafeteria.
“The funny thing was to see all these New York producers in limos pull up in front of the school, not knowing where to go,” recalls Boyd. “We told them, ‘Here's the entrance to the cafeteria.’” Second Stage then presented it and brought in Lapine to do a little more development. It immediately moved to Broadway. This was all within the span of a year and a half.
“What Boyd and Finn did pretty spectacularly is they created an audience that wanted to see the first version of something,” says Paul. “When I talk to people, there is clearly a great sense of pride that they were at the cafeteria for Spelling Bee.”
The Berkshires became quite the perfect setting for Finn. He bought a Victorian house nicknamed “Wasabi Gables” located across the street from Boyd’s house and within a mile of Barrington Stage’s Boyd-Quinson Theater and St. Germain Stage. (Finn was known to call out to Boyd from his home and invite himself over for breakfast on her porch.)
Barrington was not only a place to develop his musicals; it was also a space to mentor young writers and have workshops. The Musical Theatre Lab started ambitiously, with three projects a summer in addition to the theater company’s summer season. They quickly learned that not everybody was like Finn, so they pared the program down to develop just one musical a year. Although the score had to be ready, there was bound to be rewrites and other work to do. “It gave writers the first scaffold in a professional theater,” says Boyd, “and they were able to take the giant step after that. Bill was a very exciting person to be with. He had this belief in the excellence of musical theater in this country. He believed these young writers were extremely talented, and there was hope for the future. He introduced me to a world of young writers that I did not know.”
Finn’s The Royal Family of Broadway was the last production he premiered at Barrington Stage Company in 2018. Afterwards, he sold his home in Pittsfield and bought the former home of his Williams College professor in Williamstown, where he lived the last six years of his life with his longtime partner, Arthur Salvadore.
Within two weeks after being named Artistic Director of Barrington Stage, Paul was invited to dinner at Finn’s home. He was very intimidated, but Paul had it in his mind that he wanted to do a show of Finn’s that first season at Barrington Stage. Whatever Finn wanted, he would do.
“I said, ‘It would be an honor to do a show of yours in my first season. I think it's important for the theater.’ And he didn't respond, and I thought he hadn't heard me, so I asked him again, and he totally ignored that and just moved the conversation along. I thought that maybe I'd done something to upset him. I didn't really understand, because I was so excited about it. And then later on, as I was leaving, out of the blue, he said, ‘Alan, I want you to do A New Brain.’
“It’s poignant that his last fully staged musical production was done at Barrington Stage—and it was something that Finn chose. It was autobiographical. It's about a writer's journey from death … to life … to writer's block … and it asks, ‘Does what you write live on beyond you?’ It brought him home.”
BSC’s commitment to new musicals continues with fuzzy, with music and lyrics by Will Van Dyke, book and lyrics by Jeff Talbott, and direction by Ellie Heyman. It runs from July 8–27. Told through the context of puppets, it’s the story of a furry little creature (named Fuzzy) who has come home to take care of their ailing mother (named Muzzy). Van Dyke wanted to use that device, because it allowed him the distance to write something that’s actually quite deep and emotional to him.
“Fuzzy isn’t the kind of musical that other theaters would do, but it is something that Barrington would,” says Paul. “Bill’s DNA is all over the place.” n
Thanks to Charlie Siedenburg, Berkshire Press Director at Barrington Stage Company, for his immeasurable help in this article.
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