TDF Stages

The conceiver and two stars of the new musical The Jonathan Larson Project on why his unknown songs are so relevant today

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For three decades, Rent has been the gateway show for many musical theatre lovers. The fact that its creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly of an aortic dissection at age 35 the day before its first preview only added to its mythos. A rock opera riff on La Bohème set in the East Village during the AIDS crisis, Rent was about artists dying too young by an artist who died too young. But during his brief life, Larson was incredibly prolific. While he's best known for Rent, which won four Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, and the autobiographical tick, tick…BOOM!, a solo show reimagined as a three-character piece by playwright David Auburn that was further expanded in the Netflix movie, Larson left a slew of unfinished projects behind. After his death, his family donated myriad boxes of his demos, lyric sheets, journals and sheet music to the Library of Congress. That's where noted theatre historian and longtime Larson fan Jennifer Ashley Tepper went to pull the pieces for The Jonathan Larson Project, a new musical revue at Off Broadway's Orpheum Theatre showcasing his wide-ranging work as a songwriter, poet, playwright and political artist.

Tepper initially dove into Larson's archive when putting together a five-song lobby concert to complement the 2014 City Center Encores! Off-Center mounting of tick, tick…BOOM! "I was just completely blown away by how much was there and how thrilling it was to go through," she recalls. "That was the seed that led to The Jonathan Larson Project. At that point, I started talking to the Larson family about expanding this into a full evening for 54 Below," where Tepper serves as the Creative and Programming Director.

That concert version of The Jonathan Larson Project ran for 12 performances in 2018 and yielded a cast recording. That's when performers Lauren Marcus (Be More Chill) and Andy Mientus (Spring Awakening) first signed on. "We figured out quite early that we're both big Jonathan Larson nerds, big Rent-heads and big fans of his other work," says Mientus. So when Tepper and director John Simpkins asked him to join the full-fledged production, it was a no-brainer.

Marcus was initially surprised Tepper tapped her for the project. While Mientus had starred as Mark in Pioneer Theatre Company's 2011 Rent and as Jon in tick, tick…BOOM! at Bucks County Playhouse in 2023, Marcus was a Larson newbie. "I don't think I am ever going to do a production of Rent, and that's cool! I'm just not really that type of singer," she says. "I never thought there was a place for me in the canon of his works. Then, lo and behold, these songs were pulled out and I was like, 'Oh my god, now these I can sing. These fit perfectly.'"

Cleverly costumed in a La Bohème T-shirt for much of the show, Marcus performs multiple numbers, notably the showstopping "Hosing the Furniture," a song Larson wrote in 1989 for a never-staged revue about the futuristic exhibits at the 1939 New York World's Fair. In it, Marcus embodies a Jetsons-esque housewife obsessed with cleaning her plastic living room set to distract from her unfulfilling life and absent husband—a stark topical and tonal departure from most of Larson's known work. Upon hearing the demo recording, Marcus was floored. "I didn't even know what to say when [Tepper] first played it for me, because it's one of the wildest songs I've ever been handed," she says. "It's the biggest gift as a performer I've ever been given in my life."

Mientus is also thrilled about the numbers he was assigned, especially "Valentine's Day," a song Larson tried to fit into several projects including Rent, though it was ultimately cut. "I feel very buoyed knowing how badly Jonathan Larson wanted that song to be public,” says Mientus. "He made a fancier demo of that one than any of the others because I think he really just wanted it out there, and I'm the one to finally give voice to it."

"Valentine's Day" illustrates the transformation of The Jonathan Larson Project from concert to fully staged musical. The 54 Below version used an older draft of the song in which "the character is singing about some girl that he knows in his life who falls into a cycle of abuse. He's outside of it," says Mientus. As the actor fleshed out his character for the Off-Broadway incarnation, he had an impulse to make it a first-person tale, but "I thought it was impossible because Jonathan's not here and we can't put words in his mouth."

While Tepper is committed to presenting Larson's work as written, she agreed with Mientus' instincts. So, "I went back into the floppy disks, and I found a version where it was written in the first person," she explains. "We did not change Jonathan's words. We're just using a different draft." This version of "Valentine's Day" was intended to be sung by Mimi in Rent to help fill in her backstory. "It felt like Jonathan was helping me along on my research journey and reaching through time to give me these songs," Tepper says.

"He had such faith in his own writing," notes Mientus. "He kept every draft; he kept all these boxes, and thankfully they didn't get lost forever when he passed. He somehow seemed to know that it was all going to be used someday."

Notions of longevity and legacy are at the heart of The Jonathan Larson Project, which makes a case for why his work continues to be so popular and influential almost 30 years after his death.

"The first day of rehearsal, we talked about the audacity of his earnestness in his writing,” says Marcus. "There's no room to pretend that you're above it or you're cooler than it. His heart was on his sleeve, and I think that there's no way that won't connect to someone who's listening. He also could write, for lack of a better word, a banger of a melody."

The question of, "What if he had lived?" hangs heavily over The Jonathan Larson Project, particularly because some of the songs feel so prescient, especially politically. "Jonathan's friends and family think that if he had lived, the next musical he wrote after Rent would've been very explicitly political," says Tepper. The song "The Truth Is a Lie" explores the concept of fake news, while "White Male World" tackles the patriarchy. There's even a sketch that includes a reference to Trump Industries as a Republican sponsor.

Was Larson somehow predicting our present? Mientus thinks it's actually history repeating itself. "The things that Jonathan was writing about—the fears he had about the direction the country was going in [during the Reagan years]—that is all still prevalent," Mientus says. "But there's also a weird comfort in it because it's this assurance from him that we've been here before and that artists did what they always did. The world did keep spinning."

Being able to share Larson's passionate and politically charged work at this particular moment feels like a privilege for the cast, which also includes Broadway vets Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones and Jason Tam. "This dream of originating new Larson material in New York City is a dream I didn't even know I could have, because who knew this was even possible?" says Mientus. "I just truly can't believe it."

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