From left, director / librettist James Lapine; André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater and former artistic director of Playwrights Horizons; composer and lyricist William Finn; and Tim Sanford, former artistic director of Playwrights Horizons.( Playwrights Horizons)
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,
46 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE July 2025