The Jonathan Larson Project – 07 March 2025                

Featuring songs from the last decade of Rent composer Jonathan Larson’s life, which was cut short of natural causes at the age of 35, The Jonathan Larson Project examines songs Larson wrote that were standalone moments in his career, drafts of songs designated for larger works, and cabaret performance moments. These pieces were presented in an order that took the audience on an emotional journey that was not chronological in terms of the order of Larson’s writing, but more of a thematic structure of the downfall of society from a mildly hopeful, slice of life opening number to alcohol, poverty, lost love, violence, hating the government, mocking societal norms, loneliness, irresponsibility, not knowing what to believe, a hope that love can heal, and a return to the piano that was Larson’s lifeblood. When taken together, the pulse of the music in your body is electric, but the messages of these songs are overwhelmingly sad, sarcastic, and painful, belying a little explored truth about Jonathan Larson—although he often made his misery into a joke (especially in tick, tick, …boom!) it’s undeniable that he was miserable for all of his adult life; he very seldom wrote about anything else.

The performances in The Jonathan Larson Project were all spectacular, especially Lauren Marcus and Taylor Iman Jones (who was heavily underutilized for her incredible level of talent) who embodied Larson’s ideas about the allure of women and commensurate burdens placed on their lives. The men in the show (Adam Chanler-Berat, Andy Mientus, Jason Tam) at times played characters who felt isolated in a way that was distant and removed from Larson’s reality, and in other moments were iterations of Jonathan Larson himself. Thematic content wise, loneliness is a prominent theme. He wants an ex “out of my dreams”. He flirts with a Valentine’s Day consisting of, “beat me til I’m black and blue”. He is “falling apart”. He “can’t find the key”. He misguides the boat into a reef that destroys life. “The truth is a lie”. Many of these moments evoke passive suicidal ideation when a character can’t escape responsibility—in “Hosing the Furniture”, his completely fictional housewife at one point wraps the hose around her neck like a noose as she incessantly tries to clean a house, driving herself further and further into insanity and exhaustion. He wrote about a world falling apart from oil spills, farcical presidential candidates, societal expectations of how the world functions, and the ever forward looking march of technology as potential vehicles for the apocalypse. His pain is palpable, as is his feeling that he is running out of time to write these warnings and struggling with rejection/not getting his point across.

It turns out he was right about running out of time, because his heart gave out and he died very young. Larson’s death is often painted as a tragic loss, and it is in the sense that he had incredible music acumen for one so young and the drive to write constantly, sometimes to the detriment of his mental health. But in watching The Jonathan Larson Project, I think a strong argument can be made that for all his gifts, Jonathan Larson wasn’t loving the life he was living, and he really didn’t have much hope about it getting better. These songs embed their message in catchy music that makes you feel alive in your body, but the lyrics, which are the only unaltered part of this particular theatre piece (alterations to the music are credited to a music supervisor and orchestrator, two music arrangers, two vocal arrangers, a playback engineering and synthesizer programmer, two associate programmers, etc), show someone who is deeply depressed and lonely, suffering from his visions of love as painful and impossible, celebrating “casual sex, pizza and beer” as the good things in life. I don’t know how someone whose work was so deeply entrenched in the dark would have reacted to a life in the spotlight. It doesn’t seem to be something he dreamt of or wanted to manifest. The limelight and the scrutiny might have made his life harder. It’s impossible to say.

In the spirit of Jonathan Larson’s work, much of which centers on things that are unknowable, I’m going to raise a glass to celebrate that, “There’s only this. Forget regret… no day but today.” We won’t know another road, and the passion and drive Jonathan Larson wrote at his piano have deeply inspired other artists, particularly marginalized artists, to carry the message forward to the next day and the next day and the next. Though tortured in life, Larson’s legacy is truly beautiful.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Candi Adams PR.