\n<\/p>\n
In his Tony-winning musical, \u201cRent,\u201d Jonathan Larson asked: \u201cHow do you measure a year in the life?\u201d<\/p>\n
The question took on an even heavier weight, with striking resonance<\/a>, after Larson died unexpectedly<\/a> at the age of 35 in 1996, hours<\/a> before the show\u2019s first preview.<\/p>\n In the years after, dozens of his unheard songs were discovered, revealing the inner workings of a prolific artist looking for his big break. Now, a new musical, \u201cThe Jonathan Larson Project<\/a>,\u201d celebrates those songs and raises a new question: How do you thread together snippets of Jonathan Larson\u2019s creative output into a musical?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt was like an expedition,\u201d the show\u2019s creator, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, said of what it was like to pore over the archive of Larson\u2019s work at the Library of Congress. \u201cLike a musical theater historian expedition, because you would go and you would find one lyric that sort of matched up with one demo that sort of matched up with an idea of another notebook.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The show is a collage of Larson\u2019s life as told through his unproduced music, some of it written when he was as young as 22, including compositions for downtown revues and cabarets, music from Larson\u2019s futuristic dystopian musical \u201cSuperbia\u201d and songs cut from \u201cRent<\/a>\u201d and \u201cTick, Tick \u2026 Boom!<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n The new show, which is in previews and opens March 10 at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village, has been years in the making. It evolved from a 2018 song cycle that Tepper staged at 54 Below, a basement cabaret club where she is the creative and programming director. Partly a tribute to Larson, the musical is also its own universal story of the artist\u2019s struggle: surviving in an unforgiving city, plumbing the depths of lived experience to create something authentic, weathering rejection after rejection.<\/p>\n On a recent afternoon at one of Larson\u2019s old haunts, the Ear Inn on Spring Street, another question hung in the air: Who is Laurie?<\/p>\n A former lover? A fictitious archetype? She\u2019s just one of the many mysteries in the hundreds of cassette tapes, scripts and music demos the writer left behind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Over turkey burgers and beer, Tepper, the director John Simpkins, the music supervisor Charlie Rosen and the actors Adam Chanler-Berat and Taylor Iman Jones discussed what it took to produce a cohesive musical out of disparate songs and material, and what it means to keep Larson\u2019s legacy alive.<\/p>\n There\u2019s something of a mystique to Larson. (\u201cKind of a weird juju about it,\u201d as Jones put it. \u201cThat\u2019s positive. Things just keep falling in place.\u201d) So it was fitting that we met at the Ear Inn and, later, visited Larson\u2019s old apartment (thanks to a generous current tenant), where he lived for 12 years, and died.<\/p>\n Larson, who brought humanity to myriad social issues like addiction and homophobia, never shied away from politics. In songs like \u201cWhite Male World,\u201d written in 1991, and \u201cThe Truth Is a Lie,\u201d written in 1990, Larson\u2019s lyrics feel eerily familiar in today\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhat emerged immediately was this connection between the time in which he was writing and right now,\u201d Simpkins said. \u201cAnd so to us, we became immediately interested in the dialogue that we could have between Jonathan, the time in which Jonathan was writing, and the time in which we find ourselves right now.\u201d<\/p>\n In one tongue-in-cheek political campaign scene, Larson lists \u201cTrump Industries\u201d as a corporate Republican sponsor.<\/p>\n \u201cWe haven\u2019t changed a word,\u201d Tepper said. \u201cThe idea is not to fix something he wrote or to make it relevant, it\u2019s to do what he wrote and to honor it.\u201d<\/p>\n In \u201cLikability\/La Di Da,\u201d a song about political candidates bending to the whims of voters and so-called experts, Larson uses the phrase \u201cMake America great.\u201d He wrote it in 1989, perhaps as a nod to Ronald Reagan\u2019s 1980 campaign slogan<\/a>.<\/p>\n Are we past our prime? If the Larson mystique wasn\u2019t already present, there were coincidences that, despite Tepper\u2019s avoidance of what she called \u201cwoo woo\u201d tendencies, did seem auspicious.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Shortly after rehearsals started, one of the actors, Lauren Marcus, returned home to find that of the dozens of posters on her wall, one was missing. Her \u201cRent\u201d poster had slipped to the ground. Not long after, Tepper\u2019s \u201cJonathan Larson Project\u201d poster, which she\u2019d had on her wall since 2018, fell to the ground in an impossible-to-reach spot behind a bookshelf (where it remains). Later, they realized that the show\u2019s load-in day at the Orpheum took place on what would have been Larson\u2019s 65th birthday.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Jonathan Larson Project\u201d \u2014 called a \u201cproject\u201d for its range of genres and story lines \u2014 supplements its minimalist set with video footage of SoHo to ground the show in today\u2019s Manhattan. But it\u2019s also awash in nostalgia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYou can lean into the homage, right?\u201d Jones said. \u201cLike, I don\u2019t necessarily need to play Mimi in a song,\u201d she said, referring to a \u201cRent\u201d character she has played before in community productions, \u201cbut I don\u2019t need to shy away from Mimi-isms or \u2018Rent\u2019-isms. It\u2019s hard to describe, but I definitely feel there\u2019s like a \u2018Rent\u2019 method of acting. It\u2019s really fun to lean into that.\u201d<\/p>\n After years of delays \u2014 because of the pandemic shutdown and the time it took to book the right theater \u2014 getting the musical to the Orpheum stage happened at lighting speed. The venue was confirmed in late November, then rehearsals began in January, and previews started this month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was fueled by fandom and discovery from the start. Back in 2014, Tepper chose five songs, largely unheard by the public, for a concert<\/a> in the New York City Center lobby ahead of an Encores! performance of \u201cTick, Tick \u2026 Boom!<\/a>\u201d The response was so enthusiastic, from \u201cRentheads<\/a>\u201d and new fans alike, that she began dreaming of expanding the concert into an evening-length work.<\/p>\n She checked in with Larson\u2019s family, who gave her the green light.<\/p>\n \u201cThey said, like, go for it, kid,\u201d Tepper said.<\/p>\n She deepened her research and in 2016 started taking the train to Washington to dig through Larson\u2019s collection at the Library of Congress, where she would spend the entire day completely immersed in his journals and music demos.<\/p>\n When she found the song \u201cGreene Street,<\/a>\u201d she was so overcome that she left the library, sat outside and cried, in awe that it had gone virtually unheard.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like the wildest, wildest dream of being a fan,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2018, a show was born. Tepper staged a 12-performance run of \u201cThe Jonathan Larson Project,\u201d a longer song cycle version<\/a> of the City Center event, at 54 Below.<\/p>\n\n
Or is this the time
To climb from the slime
Make America great
Are we so hollow
That we blindly follow
And swallow
Whatever they put on our plate?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n