NEW YORK — Jonathan Larson, the cheerily boyish composer of the musical “Rent,” died in 1996 at the age of 35. “The Jonathan Larson Project,” the new off-Broadway collection of his unheard songs, is a bit like opening a time capsule. Larson never got to grow old and write the kind of songs people write as they confront middle age and beyond, likely turning cynical in the face of failure. He is forever young, forever hopeful, forever pushing forward.
Thus Larson, who would have hit 65 this year, has a body of work that is perpetually insecure and optimistic, a catalog of aspirational songs reflecting his struggles to break through, his perennial impecunity, his love of friends and family and his centrality in his East Village community of striving artists and musicians.
Some of his songs are, of course, world-famous thanks to “Rent”: “Seasons of Love,” “I’ll Cover You,” “La Vie Bohème.” Thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who idolizes Larson and his work, the film version of “Tick, Tick … Boom” made yet more songs familiar, as well as the Larson biography itself, including his decade waiting tables at the famed but now defunct Moondance Diner in SoHo. (I had a post-show drink at the same address in his honor.)
But “The Jonathan Larson Project,” conceived by Jennifer Ashley Tepper, directed by John Simpkins and staged at the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village, concentrates on adding to that catalog. The 90-minute revue features songs that were cut from both “Rent” and “Tick, Tick … Boom” but is dominated by songs penned either as standalone compositions or created for shows unproduced and rediscovered after Larson’s death on various cassette tapes, sheets of paper, music files, journals, yada, yada. When he wrote most of them, only his friends (and maybe Stephen Sondheim, an early supporter) knew who he was. But 35 years later, they’re both messages from the past and, frankly, a painful reminder of what the American musical theater lost when one of its 20th century geniuses died so early in his life.
Unlike, say, a Sondheim revue that can focus on different stages of an artist’s life, “The Jonathan Larson Project” is by necessity just one era of a New York creative life, all in a big, emotionally intense rush, being as Larson famously wore his heart on his sleeve.
It’s a five-performer affair: Adam Chanler-Berat, who looks like Larson himself, and Jason Tam, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus and Andy Mientus all to some degree embody different flavors of the man as they perform his songs on the Orpheum’s small stage, with band in the rear. The songs are all presented exactly as they were written; nary a lyrical word, it is said, has been changed.
Often, when cut (or “trunk”) songs are rediscovered and performed, you learn pretty fast why they were cut in the first place and that’s true in a couple of places here. But given the near-mythic status that Larson’s work enjoys, at least in certain musical-loving circles, they also carry historical import. They are all revealing of a man whose emotional openness and uninhibited approach to structure were (and are) massively influential on the American musical.
The songs are, for the most part, very fun and sweet. “Green Street” is the opening charmer, penned when Larson was in his early 20s and just moving to New York. “Out of My Dreams” is a ballad I’d never heard before and struck me as an oft-ignored link from Larson to the world of yacht rock, a term I do not intend as an insult but to note that he could also have written some great studio-recorded pop songs. I did know “Love Heals,” the kind of song that brings memories of the AIDS era rushing back. At least to me.
This is a modestly scaled and earnestly performed project that has no choice but to try and cohere material that Larson did not actually intend, of course, to be cohered. That’s a given. Larson’s fans won’t care about, that although I think some of us were looking for a deeper emotional dive, at least in the songs that accommodate one, being as young Larson also wrote political satire and often wrote songs for specific entities of events, such as for his alma mater, Adelphi University. He was into sci-fi, too.
Still, there we all were at the Orpheum, collectively ruminating on the lost genius of Jonathan Larson. A fine way to spend 90 minutes on what otherwise was, for me, an all too ordinary Sunday.
At the Orpheum Theatre 126 2nd Ave., New York; thejonathanlarsonproject.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
