KEY POINTS:
While some songwriters do their darnedest to separate the personal and the public, American composer William Finn has always put heart and soul on the line whenever he feels a song coming on.
Initially, the 56-year-old composer seemed like an off-Broadway cousin of the more successful Stephen Sondheim;
in 1979, the same year that Sondheim went operatic in Sweeney Todd, Finn's In Trousers was staged at the workshop-style venue of Playwrights Horizons.
Trousers introduced us to Marvin, the quintessential Finn hero, a neurotic, sexually confused Jewish-American man whose lifestyle dilemmas would fuel two musical sequels in March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland.
Having experienced Finn's Falsettoland in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, I can vouch for the sweep-away power of this hyperactive music. Finn does a nifty line in the kvetching equivalent of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song (Four Jews in a Room Bitching) but, every now and then, a ballad comes along that soars to the rafters.
By Falsettoland, Finn had brought the musical out of the closet; Marvin was divorced, had come to terms with being gay and now had to deal with his lover contracting Aids.
Reality came even closer to home in 1998 when Finn penned A New Brain, after recovering from his own brain surgery.
Five years on, Elegies, a self-described "Song-Cycle", was more relaxed. There was theatrical history in songs like Joe Papp, a tribute to the man behind Hair, and New York's Shakespeare in the Park.
The emotional high point of Elegies came from Betty Buckley as a teacher, dying of cancer, counting her achievements in terms of "one student who rarely watches television".
Precision is at the very heart of 2005's The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which opens with a contestant getting axed for not being able to spell "syzgy".
The popularity of this "Chorus Line with pimples", as one critic described it, was long overdue. Resolutely hip, this was the musical equivalent of a Michael Moore documentary, with adults playing precocious children.
The sharp little songs deliver stings by the second; unforgettable characters include Chip, who is working in a fast-food bar because puberty thwarted his Spelling Bee turn. He sings about it in the song My Unfortunate Erection.
Finn is cult, but classy cult, and YouTube devotees will proudly point out that colleges in the United States stage Spelling Bee alongside Urinetown and Annie.
Today Finn is on the faculty of the Tisch School of Performing Arts at New York University. Projects abound, including The Royal Family of Broadway, which has been promised for some time now.
Back in 2001, with a voice that made Tom Waits seem like a crooner, he previewed a few of the show's songs. One sets off with: "Reading papers when there ain't a review is a stupid thing and I won't do it".
After the runaway success of Spelling Bee, perhaps he has relented.
