“The Jonathan Larson Project,” a years-in-the-making musical collage of Larson’s life, features songs he wrote before he died. Now it’s onstage at the Orpheum.
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!”
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Source: Theater - nytimes.com
