William Finn has left the lyrics everywhere –In the margins, scribbled diagonally at the back of the script pages, in and out of the binders. He could never find the one he wanted. “That's not it. The real one is much better.”
He preferred a relaxed working environment. “Do you do your best when you try to press it or when you have fun?” He would ask. Then he commanded lunch. You can hear many stories of people who go to Berkshires For a meeting with Bill to end up looking at it while looking Project track with him.
Bill trusted his process, his instinct, his taste. “I have a nose,” he said. He would say that about the art displayed on each wall of his house, a Crayed Tapir to a painting by Honey Boo Boo – a line of virtuosity and irreverence. And he would say it on collaborators, proud of his ability to “sniff” talent. Undeniably, the list of his first arrangers, assistants, music directors, actors is full of people who have become theater lights.
The bill is looming in many lives: great in presence, large in voice, large in impact. For me, see a university production of Falsettos walk was revealing: Oh, musicals can be personal and idiosyncratic! They can manage the contemporary and the complex. They can be stunned with the pleasure of performance while aiming at something essential.
I was in the presence of Bill several times where fans came to tell him how much Falsettos Or A new brain Or Spelling bee meant in their lives, with which he would respond in a characteristic way: “Well, whatever”, when he absorbed him. He could let you know that he was happy and minimize him at the same time.
He found charm on a studied occasion, both in his words and the person. A wardrobe full of black t-shirts and the words of carelessness, a pleasure in the conversation, the individual. He loved the internal rhyme, liked to please his own ear. If it sometimes involved creating words for rhyme, it was part of the pleasure. Sometimes stupidity was a Trojan horse for emotion. His writing appears on the flow of consciousness, and in part, but it is also, as he liked to emphasize, rigorously shaped. I find informative to read Finn's words alongside poetry – think of Frank O'Hara, or Whitman crossed with Ogden Nash. He knew what kind of voice he wanted to bring to the theater.
And he was motivated by music. He loved great musical theater and writing for them. It was a treat to hear him sit on the piano playing the first sketches of songs, not a light touch on the keys, singing in a teeming voice, then going to a screaming falsle, stretching the vowels.
Bill was the first to admit that he was not always easy. It could be difficult to make him change things – only James Lapine could, and sometimes even James Lapine could not. There are 20 years of students in Nyu whose life that Bill transformed with his attention – and others who dropped his class, pushed back by his shameless and opinion style. He never pretended to teach someone else's aesthetics. It was less likely to give a detailed criticism than to say: “It is not good, write another.” When colleagues could work on missions of several pages, Bill would come and say: “Write on February” or “write on a sandwich” and would cause the best work of the year.
In tribute to Finn at Barrington Stage, I said once he always treated me with great generosity and disdain. He approved this message. Work together on …Spelling beeBill excelled not to be distracted by ideas that do not inspire him and respond with enthusiasm to those who did it. Later, I came to trust what I called his inattention genius. If he was distracted or nodded while I explained an idea, it was the wrong direction.
Bill liked to be entertained – ask many times to hear people's personal stories. It may also be why he loved reality TV. If it is a famous genre for the manipulation of truth, which has echoed its approach: find entertainment in truth, find the truth in entertainment.
Last year, Bill started a song cycle with music by Danny Ursetti, in parallel with his experience with the pandemic: “I had a stroke in September / not a bad.
The cycle also includes a discreet love song to Arthur Salvadore, the devoted partner of Bill 45 years old: “I suppose we hear ourselves.”
You cannot understand Bill without celebrating Arthur, as the best Bill songs often do. Which includes the magnificent “I prefer to be navigated” A new brain::
I prefer to navigate
Yes, I would like to sail
And then go home
Note that the affirmative in parenthesis. You can hear it in other Finn songs (“Yes I do, yes I do it, yes I do”). He always aimed at the positive, formulated in the negative, or brought it by ostensibly not his perspectives. In this way, he could maintain a gruff exterior while channeling characters to teach that “li-iiii-vie has infinite joy”.
Rachel Sheinkin is a playwright, lyricist and a Tony's book for musical theater. She worked with William Finn on The 25th annual bee of Putnam County And The Royal Broadway family.
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