Will Aronson

Will Aronson, born William Landry Aronson in 1981, is an American composer and writer for musical theater. He grew up in Guilford, Connecticut, where he began piano lessons at age eight and sang in the chorus at Elizabeth C. Adams Middle School. At Guilford High School, from which he graduated in 2000, he played trombone in both the jazz band and pit orchestra. His participation in the jazz band's involvement with the Essentially Ellington Competition later served as part of the inspiration for Maybe Happy Ending.

Aronson earned a B.A. in music from Harvard University, where he composed the score for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals' 154th production, Snow Place Like Home, and served as co-author and lyricist of its 155th production, It's a Wonderful Afterlife. Following his undergraduate studies, he pursued Music Theory as a Fulbright Scholar at Universität der Künste in Berlin. He subsequently completed an M.F.A. in the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, during which he received the ASCAP Frederick Loewe Scholarship and a 2006 Baryshnikov Fellowship. In 2007, the Dramatists Guild of America named him one of "50 to Watch."

Among his theatrical scores are Pete the Cat, Mother, Me & the Monsters, The Trouble with Doug, Hansel & Gretl & Heidi & Günter, and Wind-Up Girl. A reading of The Trouble with Doug, co-written with Daniel Maté, was directed by Victoria Clark at the NAMT theater festival in 2010. Aronson wrote the score for a musical adaptation of the Korean film My Scary Girl, with book and lyrics by Kyoung-ae Kang, which ran in Seoul and won Best Original Musical in the small theater category at the 2009 Korea Musical Awards. An English-language version, with book co-written by Mark St. Germain and additional lyrics by William Finn, ran at Barrington Stage Company's Stage II in July 2008, and the Korean version was later presented at the New York Musical Theater Festival in October 2009, where it was named Outstanding New Musical. In 2011, Aronson composed the score for Mormons, Mothers and Monsters, with book and lyrics by Sam Salmond, also at Barrington Stage Company's Stage II. That same year, he served as musical arranger for the Finn-Lapine musical Little Miss Sunshine at La Jolla Playhouse. His collaborations with William Finn also include songs for Sybille Pearson's play Next, Mary Testa's Sleepless Variations, and Finn's Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Aronson's partnership with lyricist Hue Park has been a defining thread of his career. The two collaborated on the 2012 Korean musical Bungee Jump, based on the 2001 film Bungee Jumping of Their Own, which won the award for best score at both the 7th Musical Awards and the 18th Korea Musical Awards. Additional collaborations with Park include Il Tenore and Ghost Bakery. Their musical Maybe Happy Ending received a try-out production at Wooran Foundation in September 2015 and was premiered by DaeMyoung Culture Factory in December 2016, directed by Kim Dong-yeon. That production won six Korean Musical Awards, including honors for Best Director, Best Music, Lyrics, and Book. The English-language version received the 2017 Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a new Korean production opened in 2018. Maybe Happy Ending had its American premiere at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in 2020 before opening on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre in the fall of 2024. In 2025, the production won six Tony Awards, including Tony Award for Best Musical, Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, and Tony Award for Best Original Score Written for the Theatre.

Beyond the stage, Aronson has composed and produced more than 200 tracks for the ESL children's book and DVD series English Egg. His accolades include the Richard Rodgers Award, the ASCAP Frederick Loewe Award, a Fulbright grant, an EST/Sloan grant, and multiple Korean Musical Awards. By way of his father, Aronson is of Jewish descent.