Уильям Алан Финн: Американдық композитор және либретшінің өмірі мен шығармашылығы

the Irish Member of Parliament

William Alan Finn (born February 28, 1952) is an American composer and lyricist. He is best known for his musicals, which include Falsettos, for which he won the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical, A New Brain (1998), and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005).

Finn was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He is Jewish, raised in conservative Judaism, and grew up in Natick, Massachusetts, with his parents and siblings, Michael and Nancy. He attended the Temple Israel in Natick, where his Rabbi was Harold Kushner. In Hebrew School, Finn wrote his first play, saying, "I don't think I ever told anyone this: The first play I ever wrote was in Hebrew. I have no idea what it was about. But it was horrible, I guarantee it. I couldn't write plays, and I couldn't really speak Hebrew, so how good could it be?" For his bar mitzvah, he received a guitar and taught himself to play. He went on to attend Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, as a music major. He originally entered as a guitar major, "When I got to college I kind of transferred to the piano. I transferred what I knew on the guitar to the piano. But when I was playing the guitar I was always writing my own songs — and singing a few of — I only had one book of folk songs, a blue book, of these sad, sad folk songs. I would start them the way they were written and then I would change them to how I wanted them I would just use the lyrics — re musicalize the lyrics."

In 1992, Finn suffered deteriorating vision, dizziness and partial paralysis and was rushed to the hospital. He had arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, in his brain stem. In September 1992, he had Gamma Knife surgery, which obliterated the AVM. After the surgery, Finn experienced a year of humbled serenity and constantly felt like he had a "new brain." Finn's 1998 musical A New Brain is based on his experience with AVM and his subsequent successful surgery. and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he is a composer and writer. Finn is a member of the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theater Writing faculty. He is the co founder and artistic producer of the Musical Theatre Lab at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, established in 2006.