Jonathan Larson
Jonathan Larson (February 4, 1960 – January 25, 1996) was an American composer who lived in New York City and authored musicals, including Rent and Tick, Tick... BOOM!. These musicals tackle serious issues such as multiculturalism, addiction, homophobia, and the AIDS epidemic, although Larson himself was heterosexual and HIV-negative. His artistic vision and goal was to fuse Generation X and the MTV Generation with the world of musical theatre in his work. This mission was clearly accomplished by his magnum opus, Rent, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won four Tony Awards; the scores of his shows reveal that he was an apt composer and lyricist.
Biography
Jonathan Larson was born in White Plains, New York, in Westchester County to a Jewish family. He was exposed to the performing arts, especially music and theatre, from an early age, as he played the trumpet and tuba in his high school band, was involved in his school's choir, and took formal piano lessons. His early musical influences were rock musicians such as Elton John and Billy Joel, as well as the classic composers of musical theatre, especially Stephen Sondheim. Larson was also involved in acting in high school, performing in lead roles in various productions at White Plains High School.
Larson attended Adelphi University in Garden City, Long Island, with a four-year scholarship as an acting major. In addition to performing in numerous plays and musicals during his college years, he began composing music, first for small student productions called cabarets, and later the score to a musical entitled Libro de Buen Amor, written by the department head, Jacques Burdick. Burdick functioned as Larson's mentor during his college education. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he participated in a summer stock theatre program in Augusta, Michigan, as a piano player, the result of which was the earning of an Equity Card for membership in the Actors' Equity Association.
Larson moved to a loft with no heat on the fifth floor of a building at the corner of Greenwich Street and Spring Street in Lower Manhattan. For about ten years he worked as a waiter at the Moondance Diner during weekends, and worked on composing and writing musicals during the weekdays. At the diner Larson later met Jesse L. Martin, who was his waiting trainee and later would perform the role of Tom Collins in the original cast of Larson's Rent. Larson and his roommates lived in harsh conditions with little money or property.
Early works
Before composing and writing Rent, his most popular and well-known work, Jonathan Larson wrote a variety of early theatrical pieces, with varying degrees of success and production.
Among his early creative works is Sacrimoralimmorality, his first musical which was co-written with David Armstrong, and originally staged at his alma mater (Adelphi University) sometime in the 1980s. Retitled Saved it played an unacclaimed one-week run in a 42nd Street theatre.
Between 1983 and 1990, Larson wrote Superbia, originally intended as a futuristic rock retelling of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, though the Orwell estate denied him permission to adapt the novel itself. Superbia won the Richard Rodgers Production Award and the Richard Rodgers Development Grant. However, despite a run at Playwrights Horizons and a few rock concert performances at the Village Gate in November of 1991, Superbia was not truly produced, leading to disappointment for Larson.
His next work, completed in 1991, was a "rock monologue" entitled Boho Days, which was later expanded and renamed "30/90" and again to (as it is now known) Tick, Tick... BOOM!. This piece, written for only Larson with a piano and rock band, was intended to be a response to his feelings of rejection caused by the failure of Superbia. The show played off-Broadway at the Charles Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, as well as at the Village Gate in the Upper West Side. The producer Jeffrey Seller saw the production of Boho Days and offered to produce Larson's musicals.
Larson came into contact with his strongest musical theatre influence, Stephen Sondheim, to whom he occasionally submitted his work for review. One Tick, Tick... BOOM! song called "Sunday" is a homage to Stephen Sondheim, who supported Larson, staying close to the melody and lyrics of Sondheim's own song of the same title but turning it from a manifesto about art into a waiter's lament. Sondheim would often write letters of recommendation for Larson to various producers. Larson later won the Stephen Sondheim Award.
In addition to his three larger theatrical pieces written before Rent, Larson also wrote music for J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation, numerous individual numbers, music for Sesame Street, music for the children's book cassettes of An American Tail and Land Before Time, music for Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner, early post-graduation works entitled Billy Bishop Goes to War, which was an En Garde Arts Company production, Mowgli, and four songs for the children's video Away We Go! (which he also conceived and directed). For his early works Larson won a grant and award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and the Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Theatre Foundation's Commendation Award.
Rent and Death
Playwright Billy Aronson [1] came up with the idea to write a musical update of La Bohème in 1988. He wanted to create "a musical based on Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, in which the luscious splendor of Puccini's world would be replaced with the coarseness and noise of modern New York".
In 1989, Larson got together with Aronson to swap ideas. Larson came up with the title and suggested moving the setting from the Upper West Side to Downtown, where Larson himself lived. Larson and his roommates lived in a rundown apartment. For a while, he and his roommates kept an illegal, wood-burning stove. He also dated a dancer for four years who sometimes left him for other men and eventually left him for another woman. Larson wanted to write about his own experience, and in 1991, he asked Billy if he could use the original concept they collaborated on and make Rent his own. They made an agreement that if the show went to Broadway, Aronson would share in the proceeds. Eventually they decided on setting the musical not in the West Village, where Larson lived, but rather in Alphabet City in the East Village.
Rent started as a staged reading in 1993 at the New York Theatre Workshop, followed by a studio production that played a three-week run a year later. However, the version that is now known worldwide, a result of the years-long collaborative and editing process between Larson and the producers and director, was not publicly performed before Larson's death. Larson died unexpectedly of an aortic dissection, believed to have been caused by Marfan syndrome, in the early morning on January 25, 1996. It was ten days before his 36th birthday, only hours after the final dress rehearsal of Rent and the day of its off-Broadway opening at the New York Theatre Workshop, near the intersection of Second Avenue and East 4th Street.
He had been suffering chest pains and nausea for several days prior, but doctors could not find signs of a heart attack and so misdiagnosed it either as flu or stress. The show premiered off-Broadway that night, on schedule. Larson's parents (who were flying in for the show anyway) gave their blessing to open the show. The cast had agreed beforehand that in light of the tragedy they would just sing through the show that night sitting at three tables lined up on stage. But by the time the show got to its high energy "La Vie Boheme", the cast could no longer contain themselves and did the rest of the show as it was meant to be.
Rent played through its planned engagement to sold-out crowds and was continuously extended. The decision was finally made to move the show to Broadway, and it opened at the Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996. In addition to the New York Theatre Workshop, Rent was and is produced by Jeffrey Seller, who was introduced to Larson's work when attending an off-Broadway performance of Boho Days, and two of his producer friends who also wished to support the work, Kevin McCollum and Allan S. Gordon.
For his work on Rent, Larson was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score; the Drama Desks for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Lyrics; the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical; the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical in the Off-Broadway category; and three Obie Awards for Outstanding Book, Outstanding Lyrics and Outstanding Music.
Legacy
Rent has played continuously on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre for more than ten years, and as of August 20, 2006, the original production has played 4,289 performances. In addition, it has toured throughout the United States, in Canada, Australia, China, Mexico, throughout Europe, and in other locations.
After his death, Larson's family and friends started the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation to provide monetary grants to artists, especially musical theatre composers and writers, to support their creative work.
Jonathan's work was given to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in December of 2003. The Jonathan Larson Collection is a new addition to its major holdings in the area of musical theater. The collection documents Larson’s surprisingly prolific output, including numerous musicals, revues, cabarets, pop songs, dance and video projects – both produced and unproduced.