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Theater|The Loose Screws, Hot Flames and Infinite Joy of William Finn
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/theater/william-finn-appraisal.html
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An Appraisal
The composer and lyricist of “A New Brain,” “Falsettos” and other shows answered the pains of life with jaunty songs. He died this week at 73.
April 8, 2025, 6:08 p.m. ET
When I met William Finn in 2005, at work on “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” he was seated in his office in front of what looked like a trash heap but might have been a desk. On a couch nearby, one of his collaborators sank slowly beneath a rising tide of detritus; when she spoke, Finn kept overwhelming her too. Bearlike and blustery, garrulous and appetitive, he grabbed at every idea floating around the room, just as he grabbed at insane rhymes and jangly melodies in writing his sometimes hilarious, sometimes haunting (sometimes both) songs.
The opportunistic lyrics were what first attracted me. By the time of “Spelling Bee,” Finn, who died Monday at the age of 73, had already made a name for himself with the “Falsettos” trilogy, his take on a family (and thus a society) shattered by disease and disaffection in the early years of AIDS. Yet despite the sadness of that story (the book is by Finn and James Lapine), the melodies are mostly jaunty and the words outrageously playful. In the show’s opening number he rhymes “four Jews” with “loose screws.”
As his later work kept digging deeper into dark themes, the rhymes got wilder, as if he were very hungry, and there was just one shrimp puff left on a plate at the other side of a party. In “A New Brain,” a show about his own near-death experience from a stroke in 1992, it was not unusual for him to match chewy words like “Thackeray” and “whackery,” even though they made little sense together. What they made instead was a tickling kind of Gertrude Stein spark, followed by an existential whack. Your ear was delighted while your brain was befuddled, which was perhaps the point because, he seemed to ask, does anything in the world make sense?
