In the three decades since the premiere of Rent and the sudden death of its 35-year-old creator, Jonathan Larson has become an almost mythic figure in the musical theater world. The admiration, and affection, are understandable given the prodigious talent the composer-lyricist displayed in his Pulitzer-winning breakout as well as earlier works like Tick, Tick… Boom! that gained a deserved reputation posthumously for their clever lyricism and prescient blend of traditional musical theater sounds and contemporary pop.
Larson fans, completists especially, will delight in The Jonathan Larson Project, a 90-minute revue that focuses not on Larson’s familiar hits but rummages through the trunk of his discarded and seldom heard compositions. There are standalone theater songs like the 1983 gem “Rhapsody,” nicely sung by Adam Chanler-Berat, which showcase Larson’s precocity by mixing elements of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” into a bitter ode to being a poor striver in a New York City where so many are “collared to the dollar.” There are cast-off songs cut from full-length musical projects, like the caustic solo “Valentine’s Day,” a discard from Rent about a young, gay leather-clad man who gets caught up in the BDSM scene more out of a longing for connection that real enthusiasm. “I feel like a fool but I like my men cruel and I doubt I’ll be cool til I’m dead,” Andy Mientus sings with soulful resignation. There are pop tunes Larson wrote in hopes that pop artists might record them, including a dance-beat bop called “Out of My Dreams” that Taylor Iman Jones delivers with real Top 40 energy and vocal fry.
Jones and the astonishing Lauren Marcus team up on another standout, a 1991 anthem called “White Male World” that name-checks a lot of then-contemporary figures from Jesse Helms to Taylor Dayne. But the show also features a glut of once-topical tunes, often written for cabarets or politically themed revues in the late 1980s and early ’90s but whose success now depends at least in part on your recollection of events like the 1986 racial attack in Howard Beach, Queens, or the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. “Iron Mike,” well sung by Jason Tam, imagines the captain of that doomed tanker as an emblem of a nation that has lost its grip on “the helm of the ship of state.” But many of these tunes feel too slight, or too dated, to hold much impact. Despite a prescient reference to Trump Industries, a story song called “The Vision Thing” written for a 1989 National Lampoon political revue probably played better 35 years ago.
By their very nature, revues are often hit or miss propositions. Here, the problem is compounded by the fact that so many of the tunes are by definition ephemera: one-offs, cast-offs, and works in progress discovered on demo tapes that Larson left behind without knowing how he intended to use them, or how complete they might be. An insert in the Playbill explains the date and origin of many of the songs — and I wish this context had been incorporated into the show itself. Especially since even the most diehard Rentheads are unfamiliar with the majority of this playlist.
As conceived by Jennifer Ashley Tepper and directed by John Simpkins, The Jonathan Larson Project assumes an awful lot of advance knowledge on the part of its audience. Granted, the show includes archival footage of Larson in his apartment or working at the Moondance Diner, and brief news clips recounting his death just before Rent‘s 1996 premiere. (Alex Basco Koch designed the video projections on Michael Schwikardt’s serviceable set.) But the talented cast of five just jumps from song to song without any sort of introduction or scene-setting, which can lead to some jarring gear changes.
The highlight is the penultimate song, “Love Heals,” which Larson composed after AIDS claimed the life of his friend Alison Gertz at age 26 (a fact we sadly only learn from that Playbill insert). The ensemble piece has the kind of elegiac quality of “Seasons of Love,” and like that classic carries a message of uplift and hope to an audience all too primed for resignation or despair. ★★☆☆☆
THE JONATHAN LARSON PROJECT
Orpheum Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 1 for $69-$164
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