Latest news with #TheJonathanLarsonProject
Chicago Tribune
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Jonathan Larson Project' is an off-Broadway chance to hear lost songs of the ‘Rent' composer
NEW YORK — Jonathan Larson, the cheerily boyish composer of the musical 'Rent,' died in 1996 at the age of 35. 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' the new off-Broadway collection of his unheard songs, is a bit like opening a time capsule. Larson never got to grow old and write the kind of songs people write as they confront middle age and beyond, likely turning cynical in the face of failure. He is forever young, forever hopeful, forever pushing forward. Thus Larson, who would have hit 65 this year, has a body of work that is perpetually insecure and optimistic, a catalog of aspirational songs reflecting his struggles to break through, his perennial impecunity, his love of friends and family and his centrality in his East Village community of striving artists and musicians. Some of his songs are, of course, world-famous thanks to 'Rent': 'Seasons of Love,' 'I'll Cover You,' 'La Vie Bohème.' Thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who idolizes Larson and his work, the film version of 'Tick, Tick … Boom' made yet more songs familiar, as well as the Larson biography itself, including his decade waiting tables at the famed but now defunct Moondance Diner in SoHo. (I had a post-show drink at the same address in his honor.) But 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' conceived by Jennifer Ashley Tepper, directed by John Simpkins and staged at the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village, concentrates on adding to that catalog. The 90-minute revue features songs that were cut from both 'Rent' and 'Tick, Tick … Boom' but is dominated by songs penned either as standalone compositions or created for shows unproduced and rediscovered after Larson's death on various cassette tapes, sheets of paper, music files, journals, yada, yada. When he wrote most of them, only his friends (and maybe Stephen Sondheim, an early supporter) knew who he was. But 35 years later, they're both messages from the past and, frankly, a painful reminder of what the American musical theater lost when one of its 20th century geniuses died so early in his life. Unlike, say, a Sondheim revue that can focus on different stages of an artist's life, 'The Jonathan Larson Project' is by necessity just one era of a New York creative life, all in a big, emotionally intense rush, being as Larson famously wore his heart on his sleeve. It's a five-performer affair: Adam Chanler-Berat, who looks like Larson himself, and Jason Tam, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus and Andy Mientus all to some degree embody different flavors of the man as they perform his songs on the Orpheum's small stage, with band in the rear. The songs are all presented exactly as they were written; nary a lyrical word, it is said, has been changed. Often, when cut (or 'trunk') songs are rediscovered and performed, you learn pretty fast why they were cut in the first place and that's true in a couple of places here. But given the near-mythic status that Larson's work enjoys, at least in certain musical-loving circles, they also carry historical import. They are all revealing of a man whose emotional openness and uninhibited approach to structure were (and are) massively influential on the American musical. The songs are, for the most part, very fun and sweet. 'Green Street' is the opening charmer, penned when Larson was in his early 20s and just moving to New York. 'Out of My Dreams' is a ballad I'd never heard before and struck me as an oft-ignored link from Larson to the world of yacht rock, a term I do not intend as an insult but to note that he could also have written some great studio-recorded pop songs. I did know 'Love Heals,' the kind of song that brings memories of the AIDS era rushing back. At least to me. This is a modestly scaled and earnestly performed project that has no choice but to try and cohere material that Larson did not actually intend, of course, to be cohered. That's a given. Larson's fans won't care about, that although I think some of us were looking for a deeper emotional dive, at least in the songs that accommodate one, being as young Larson also wrote political satire and often wrote songs for specific entities of events, such as for his alma mater, Adelphi University. He was into sci-fi, too. Still, there we all were at the Orpheum, collectively ruminating on the lost genius of Jonathan Larson. A fine way to spend 90 minutes on what otherwise was, for me, an all too ordinary Sunday.
New York Times
25-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Corrections: Feb. 25, 2025
An article on Saturday about what Black Americans think about President Trump's actions in his first month in office omitted political affiliations for Javon Evans and Paul James Jr. Mr. Evans volunteers as communications director for the Houston Young Republicans and Mr. James serves as the president of the Young Republicans of Bexar County. An article on Saturday about a federal judge extending an order blocking the National Institutes of Health from reducing grant funding to institutions conducting medical and scientific research misspelled the surname of the lawyer representing the government. He is Brian Lea, not Lee. A picture caption with an article on Monday about a new musical, 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' misstated the title of the first full book musical that Larson attempted to stage. It was '1984' (a stage adaptation of the George Orwell novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'), not an 'Ideal Situation.' An obituary on Friday about David L. Boren, a Democrat who served one term as governor of Oklahoma and three terms as a United States senator, misstated part of the name of a group of his supporters who converged on the Capitol in Oklahoma City when he ran for governor in 1974. It was the Boren Broom Brigade, not the Boren Broomstick Brigade. The obituary also misstated the name of the high school from which Mr. Boren graduated. It is Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, not Chevy Chase High School. An obituary on Sunday about William R. Lucas, who oversaw the development of rockets for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, referred incorrectly to Christa McAuliffe, one of the astronauts killed in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. She was to be the first American teacher in space, not the first American civilian. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
New York Times
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Finding a Common Thread in Jonathan Larson's Unheard Music
In his Tony-winning musical, 'Rent,' Jonathan Larson asked: 'How do you measure a year in the life?' The question took on an even heavier weight, with striking resonance, after Larson died unexpectedly at the age of 35 in 1996, hours before the show's first preview. 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, 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' celebrates those songs and raises a new question: How do you thread together snippets of Jonathan Larson's creative output into a musical? 'It was like an expedition,' the show's creator, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, said of what it was like to pore over the archive of Larson's work at the Library of Congress. 'Like 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.' The show is a collage of Larson's 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's futuristic dystopian musical 'Superbia' and songs cut from 'Rent' and 'Tick, Tick … Boom!' 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's struggle: surviving in an unforgiving city, plumbing the depths of lived experience to create something authentic, weathering rejection after rejection. On a recent afternoon at one of Larson's old haunts, the Ear Inn on Spring Street, another question hung in the air: Who is Laurie? A former lover? A fictitious archetype? She's just one of the many mysteries in the hundreds of cassette tapes, scripts and music demos the writer left behind. 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's legacy alive. There's something of a mystique to Larson. ('Kind of a weird juju about it,' as Jones put it. 'That's positive. Things just keep falling in place.') So it was fitting that we met at the Ear Inn and, later, visited Larson's old apartment (thanks to a generous current tenant), where he lived for 12 years, and died. Larson, who brought humanity to myriad social issues like addiction and homophobia, never shied away from politics. In songs like 'White Male World,' written in 1991, and 'The Truth Is a Lie,' written in 1990, Larson's lyrics feel eerily familiar in today's culture. 'What emerged immediately was this connection between the time in which he was writing and right now,' Simpkins said. 'And 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.' In one tongue-in-cheek political campaign scene, Larson lists 'Trump Industries' as a corporate Republican sponsor. 'We haven't changed a word,' Tepper said. 'The idea is not to fix something he wrote or to make it relevant, it's to do what he wrote and to honor it.' In 'Likability/La Di Da,' a song about political candidates bending to the whims of voters and so-called experts, Larson uses the phrase 'Make America great.' He wrote it in 1989, perhaps as a nod to Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign slogan. If the Larson mystique wasn't already present, there were coincidences that, despite Tepper's avoidance of what she called 'woo woo' tendencies, did seem auspicious. 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 'Rent' poster had slipped to the ground. Not long after, Tepper's 'Jonathan Larson Project' poster, which she'd 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's load-in day at the Orpheum took place on what would have been Larson's 65th birthday. 'The Jonathan Larson Project' — called a 'project' for its range of genres and story lines — supplements its minimalist set with video footage of SoHo to ground the show in today's Manhattan. But it's also awash in nostalgia. 'You can lean into the homage, right?' Jones said. 'Like, I don't necessarily need to play Mimi in a song,' she said, referring to a 'Rent' character she has played before in community productions, 'but I don't need to shy away from Mimi-isms or 'Rent'-isms. It's hard to describe, but I definitely feel there's like a 'Rent' method of acting. It's really fun to lean into that.' After years of delays — because of the pandemic shutdown and the time it took to book the right theater — 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. 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 in the New York City Center lobby ahead of an Encores! performance of 'Tick, Tick … Boom!' The response was so enthusiastic, from 'Rentheads' and new fans alike, that she began dreaming of expanding the concert into an evening-length work. She checked in with Larson's family, who gave her the green light. 'They said, like, go for it, kid,' Tepper said. She deepened her research and in 2016 started taking the train to Washington to dig through Larson's collection at the Library of Congress, where she would spend the entire day completely immersed in his journals and music demos. When she found the song 'Greene Street,' she was so overcome that she left the library, sat outside and cried, in awe that it had gone virtually unheard. 'It was like the wildest, wildest dream of being a fan,' she said. In 2018, a show was born. Tepper staged a 12-performance run of 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' a longer song cycle version of the City Center event, at 54 Below. The show featured five actors and a band — as does 'The Jonathan Larson Project' today — who recorded the songs as an album the following year. 'It's a little bit of, like, a seance when the composer is no longer with you,' said Rosen, the musical supervisor. 'You don't want it to be a pastiche,' he added. Tasked with orchestrating and co-arranging, Rosen looked to Larson's musical influences, the time period and the many genres in his work to piece things together — and make it relevant. Thankfully, the quality of Larson's demos helped. 'The fact that he even had the ability to record a piano and then go back and record his voice over the already recorded piano,' Rosen said, 'most people didn't have access to that then.' Larson, Tepper said, felt his work was incomplete without instrumentation beyond piano. Arranging his songs with a full band is a way of finishing what he started, a production quality Larson simply couldn't afford. 'When I listen to this music, I hear it as a survival guide for getting through hard times,' said Chanler-Berat, who plays a version of Larson's characters and himself. 'And I mean that as an artist, but I also mean that as a citizen.' The artist's life that Larson lived in the '80s and '90s looks a little different today. There's a Sweetgreen around the corner from his apartment on Greenwich Street. The view he once had of the Hudson River has been replaced with a towering glass building. There is no trace of the phone booth that once sat across the street, where, in the absence of a functional buzzer, Larson's visitors would call to have him throw down a key to the building. But at its core, as his music transmits, the trials artists face is the same: finding the time to create; mustering the resolve to flout traditional expectations of success; staying financially afloat and cutting through the dull rhythm of manual labor or the fog of corporate malaise to excavate what alights the soul. 'Oh piano,' Larson croons in an unfinished song, 'you saved my soul again. Oh piano, you saved my soul, amen.'
