A New Brain

A New Brain features music and lyrics by William Finn and book by Finn and James Lapine. A New Brain started as a "series of songs that Finn wrote after he left the hospital", with a concert of those songs produced at The Public Theater. A fully staged workshop production was held in 1996 and again in 1997 and the musical premiered Off-Broadway in 1998.

By the Tony Award-winning authors of Falsettos, here is an energetic, sardonic, often comical musical about a composer during a medical emergency. Gordon collapses into his lunch and awakes in the hospital, surrounded by his maritime-enthusiast lover, his mother, a co-worker, the doctor, and the nurses. Reluctantly, he had been composing a song for a children’s television show that features a frog – Mr. Bungee – and the specter of this large green character and the unfinished work haunts him throughout his medical ordeal. What was thought to be a tumor turns out to be something more operable, and Gordon recovers, grateful for a chance to compose the songs he yearns to produce.