E-Mail This Article to a Friend Death takes a holiday The composer of Falsettos turns elegiac BY SALLY CRAGIN

For a composer fascinated with death, Tony-winning composer and Natick native William Finn (Falsettos) has a sanguine, even absurdist outlook. This keeps popping up in his wry and sinuous songs. His latest show, Elegies: A Song Cycle, is a collection of musical memorials; directed by Paul Daigneault (Bat Boy), it’ll be getting its New England premiere from SpeakEasy Stage Company starting next Friday.

The score amounts to a Rolodex of the departed. There’s a Biblically-tinged tribute to theater impresario Joe Papp; there are graceful ballads about Finn’s late mother, various snapshots of gay and straight friends, and even loving tributes to departed pets and neighborhood stores. "I wanted to pay honor to the people I loved and was trying to deal with their loss in a cogent way," he explains over the phone from New York. "I was also trying to see whether art really heals."

Elegies opened in New York last spring to glowing reviews. Although the composer is most often compared with Stephen Sondheim, who also specializes in surprising melodies and witty lyrics, Finn’s work has a vulnerability and poignancy that is winning him a growing audience and ever-multiplying productions of his shows. "The universities are riddled with my work," he laughs.

Certainly it’s Finn time in Massachusetts. In addition to the SpeakEasy production, MIT Theater Guild is presenting his musical about being diagnosed with brain cancer, A New Brain, through May 1; Barrington Stage Company will premiere his latest project, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, this summer; the Huntington Theatre Company will revive Falsettos in May of 2005; and Finn will make a special appearance at the New Opera and Musical Theatre Initiative’s "Birth of a Musical" festival this May 15. He’ll also preside over a "talk-back" after the May 15 performance of Elegies.

For someone who describes himself as a "self-taught musical cripple," it’s all gravy. "It goes to prove what working hard does," he says, adding that he’s working harder than ever on his own material, thanks to the class in harmony he teaches in NYU’s Tisch graduate program. "I don’t allow students to get away with things I’d get away with, and I don’t let myself get away with things anymore."

Throughout Elegies, a spirit of uplift — and plenty of humor — dominates. In the jazzy "Joe Papp," the producer’s name becomes a subject for scatting, and the battle Papp waged with New York parks commissioner Robert Moses to create a theater in Central Park becomes an Old Testament–style saga: "I never understood/What Joe was saying to me/He’d quote Shakespeare and I’d simply nod/Is this how the prophets felt in the presence of God?"

Finn’s melodies can summon up the spirit of Brecht and later cabaret artists as time signatures bob and weave, and for all the economy of his narrative, Elegies presents a varied and even reassuring world view. "I was trying to extend the American song as I knew it so it could encompass story, pathos, and point of view." Although there are ballads, there’s an overall lightness about the score, one that presents folks known and obscure together in the same canon. "Because I’m potentially so dark personally, I try to leaven it. I don’t go to the theater to get depressed. I want to laugh and have a good time."

Elegies: A Song Cycle is presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the South End, May 7 through 29. Tickets are $25 to $35, with $15 student rush; call (617) 426-2787.