Review: The Jonathan Larson Project, a Taste of the Rent Composer's Left-Behinds

For the musical-theater kids of the 1990s, Jonathan Larson wasn’t just a composer—he was a revolution unto himself. After spending most of his formative years pounding the pavement, Larson’s rock reimagining of La Bohème burst onto the scene so forcefully in 1996 that it singlehandedly catapulted the American musical into its future. Larson didn’t live to see his acclaim; he died of an undiagnosed heart ailment the morning of Rent‘s first preview at New York Theatre Workshop, a twist of fate so cruel it’s almost hard to believe.

Larson left behind a vault of unproduced work, including a discarded adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, its rights denied, and the dystopian Superbia, which was born in its wake and was eventually abandoned after countless workshops. Tick, Tick…Boom!, a rock monologue that lamented Superbia‘s rejection alongside the fear of becoming an adult, has since become just as much of a staple of the repertory as Rent. Countless Larson standalone songs, old drafts, demos, and other ephemera live in boxes at the Library of Congress, where they can be viewed by eager historians like Jennifer Ashley Tepper, an avowed Renthead with a career as programming director at the nightclub 54 Below.

Tepper spent most of the 2010s scouring the archives to craft a cabaret night of Larson’s unheard material. The Jonathan Larson Project was born in a basement in 2018, a thrilling evening that carried the genuine sense of discovering an artist for the very first time. Seven years later, it has moved to the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village, where Stomp was clanking on garbage cans while Rent was debuting four blocks away.

With director John Simpkins, Tepper has since given the evening a loose structure that finds a quintet of friends—played by Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus, Andy Mientus, and Jason Tam—sharing their writing at a dive bar. This pretense is dropped after the first few numbers, and each successive song becomes its own scene before we eventually land back in the saloon at the very end. I’m reluctant to say that The Jonathan Larson Project works as a “show” in the kind of traditional form that Tepper and Simpkins have imposed upon it, but it remains a hell of a concert, and an exhilarating reintroduction to a writer whose prescience is downright scary.

The numbers that worked at 54 Below kill just as reliably here. Most memorable is “Hosing the Furniture,” a musical nervous breakdown satirizing 1930s domesticity that is electrifyingly delivered by Marcus, who has burrowed even deeper into the harrowing nuances of the lyrics. She and Jones inject a searing rage into the already blistering “White Male World,” an indictment of toxic masculinity that could have been written yesterday.

The noteworthy discovery is “The Vision Thing,” an explicitly political sequence where a group of spin doctors focus-group a Republican presidential candidate (Marcus) to be more likable. It feels so timely that it’s hard to believe it was written almost 40 years ago, but it peters out so the show can move on. I would have liked to have seen more.

Mientus brings a grungy edge to the catchy “Valentine’s Day,” a heartbreaker cut from both Rent and a revue called Prostate of the Union. Tam plaintively delivers an equally great story-song called “Iron Mike,” originally a response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and Chanler-Berat makes “Rhapsody,” a love-hate letter to life in NYC, seem like a great song when it’s just an OK one.

Simpkins’s production feels very Renty, from the scaffolds of Michael Schweikardt’s set to Tracy Christiansen’s costumes, which could easily have been broken in by a greedy broker who went broke and then broke down. The sound (Justin Stasiw) isn’t great—the band shouldn’t seem like they’re being pumped in from across the street—and that’s a real shame. Charlie Rosen’s orchestrations are the show’s greatest gift, giving contemporary joie de vivre to the modern Broadway rock sound that Larson popularized in 1996. If only we could hear them with more clarity.

While each song’s context is provided in a program leaflet, delivering it from the stage might have been more impactful, as Larson’s work remains as powerful today as it was in the Reagan era—history, after all, doesn’t repeat, but it certainly rhymes. If you know him only from Rent, The Jonathan Larson Project reveals just how much more there is to discover, making his untimely death feel even more heartbreaking.