Word: finn
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...lilting about how "everyone hates his parents" or has two women characters cheerily introduce themselves as "the lesbians from next door." But then, only Falsettos, which capped off the Broadway season last week to wide critical acclaim, has music and lyrics by the quirky, quixotic, querulous and unquenchable William Finn. Depending on your ears, Finn is either Stephen Sondheim's natural successor or merely his canniest imitator. (Both are graduates of Williams College, and Sondheim, it is said, thinks the resemblance stops there...
Like Sondheim, Finn is prone to write tinkly, brittle art songs that break off in midphrase and to fill them with lyrics so clever they reward, and maybe require, repeated hearing. Like Sondheim, he is witty, wistful and wickedly funny. But Finn is readier to satisfy the playgoer's yearning for a hummable phrase. In Falsettos he gives every character a big ballad, ranging from the tender What More Can I Say to the abandoned wife's showstopper I'm Breaking Down to the AIDS patient's edgy, sardonic You Gotta Die Sometime. In all, the three dozen musical numbers...
...Finn, 40, the Broadway debut of Falsettos is the fulfillment of an obsession. In 1979 he wrote a short musical called In Trousers about Marvin, a repressed homosexual who hears the mating call of liberation, ends his marriage and, in one memorable if unnerving moment of stagecraft, sings about the exquisite pleasures of oral sex with his new boyfriend Whizzer. Finn makes no bones about the piece's autobiographical flavor: "Though his history bears no relationship to mine, temperamentally Marvin is me. He is not easy. He is no joy to live with. But there is something to admire...
...years later, Finn advanced Marvin's story in March of the Falsettos, which begins with Marvin envisioning his old and new lives merging into one big, happy family and ends with him alone. The narrative was shaped with director James Lapine, who vaulted from that into becoming Sondheim's director and librettist on his two most recent Broadway musicals, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. But Finn could not seem to capitalize on his new opportunities...
...Carol A. Finn, assistant to the master of Dunster House, supports the new system because transfer students can now enter the lotteries in their new houses instead of floating into leftover spaces...