REVIEW: The Jonathan Larson Project

Frustrating, heartbreaking, and illuminative.

A new Off-Broadway show that I find culturally important has finally opened, and it would enrich the world if people went to see it. I gave some background on Jonathan Larson in my Tick, Tick, Boom post in 2021, but to recap: A talented young musical theater writer works tirelessly to make art in the cynical landscape of ‘90s New York City. The night before his work finally gets off-Broadway, he dies at the age of 35. The show continues. It’s Rent. He posthumously wins the Pulitzer, Tony Awards, and the hearts of theater kids for the rest of time.

The Jonathan Larson Project opens by using screen backdrops to show this timeline, beginning with footage from Jonathan himself of his apartment. Immediate tears. The cruel dramatic irony of Jonathan’s life underscores the work he left behind. Many songs in this cycle are self-referential, expressing his desire to find success before he runs out of time. It is devastating.

The Project is the full realization of Larson songs written for various projects. Some are cut songs from Rent and Tick, Tick, Boom, some written for revues put on by friends, and some had never been heard before the first staged version of this show at 54 Below in 2018. Though the songs are unrelated, his work gives you a total picture of a man: his beliefs, his fears, his hopes. And it shows the audience that whatever you’re worried about politically in this moment, a guy 30 years ago was screaming from the top of his lungs trying to warn us about it.

The show is the dream of producer and theatre historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper, who went to the Library of Congress herself and unearthed these amazing and sometimes surprising songs. This assortment has songs that have been taken so far out of their context they require the Playbill insert detailing them. For example, “Hosing the Furniture” was written for a revue of songs about the 1939 World’s Fair, and won him a Stephen Sondheim scholarship. Jennifer wrote how she curated the original show here: https://blogs.loc.gov/music/2018/09/finding-jonathan-larsons-lost-works-in-tapes-and-boxes-and-turning-them-into-a-show/.

Even more songs express his frustration with the American political landscape, and first-time viewers may be shocked at their prescience. The show has a disclaimer that not a word has been changed. The best among them, in my opinion, “The Truth Is a Lie.” With a driving rock sound, it’s a biting satire on American culture, propaganda, and censorship, with verses getting increasingly spooky in their relevance.

Bensonhurst was a publicity stunt
AIDS is a myth
First amendment's fake
The sun revolves around the earth
And the Holocaust never took place

….

Women ask to be black and blue
And pregnant their entire lives
The earth is flat, and the white man
Knows what's best for everyone
Don't look out the window
Don't go to the mirror
Don't you know what you might see?

Don't look at the picture
Don't go to the theater
Don't you know what you will see?

The truth is a lie

The songs are presented by characters: the actors act them out as if in their original context and never address the audience as themselves. I appreciate the impulse to stay true to Jonathan’s original vision, but the reality is we are all watching this work with the knowledge that he is dead and has been for 30 years. That context is unavoidable, and brings deeper meaning to the work. There are many aspects of Larson’s life we don’t know anything about because the artist collectives and venues don’t exist anymore. It would have been awesome to acknowledge the song’s history and original purpose onstage rather than being relegated to a program many won’t read, and certainly can’t as the show is being performed.

It also speaks to the artistic process; the show’s material points to it so directly. Tepper continuing Larson’s process by discovering the material adds another layer of wonder to what we’re seeing. This art could have died with him, and the act of preservation is miraculous. We want to see the work and its history alive together.

Just one page of the context in question.

There’s one thing about this production that makes me so put off that I almost don’t want to talk about it, but I feel I have a duty to. The screen backdrops, at points, used AI generated images. They were straight-up ugly, and they were distracting from the material. It disgusted me how the show honored an artist and then presented his work alongside bad, pointless, anti-art. When the women sing about the “White Male World,” the list of images Larson evokes absolutely speak for themselves. We do not need smooth, creepy images of white men to accompany them.

This is the tragic truth of The Jonathan Larson Project: here existed an artist who was so intelligent, so talented, and so full of potential, and we will never know what would have come next. We don’t really know what he would have thought of our world. Thanks to these songs being in a theatre, they can still speak to the current moment and provide some truth and context, 30 years on.