The ticking world of Jonathan Larson
On Friday February 4, Jonathan Larson would have turned 62. His musical legacy lives on with Rent being one of the longest-running shows on Broadway.
“The world is calling/it’s now or Neverland” go two lines in the song 30/90 by Jonathan Larson, the composer, lyricist and playwright who would have turned 62 last week, or as a fan of his blockbuster Rent might put it, 543,504 hours.
30/90 is code for the birthday of its protagonist, also called Jon, played by Andrew Garfield in Tick, Tick… Boom!, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s adaptation of Larson’s partly-autobiographical musical, now on Netflix.
In the musical, Jon is a writer/composer with unfulfilled Broadway aspirations. He is turning 30, in 1990, and is terrified by what that means for him and his career. 30/90‘s lyrics are filled with protests (“freeze the frame”) and mental escape attempts (“why can’t I stay a child forever”). Yet in the end, the other lyrics are overwhelmed by its title—”30/90, 30/90, 30/90″—repeating like an alarm that can’t be turned off.
Larson’s lyrics in this and other songs are not just aware of the passing of time. They are obsessed with it. Rent‘s Seasons of Love translates “a year in the life” to “525,600 minutes”, lest we forget the moments we idly let pass by, which never stop adding up. The opening of Tick, Tick… Boom! features literal ticking to represent “the sound of one man’s mounting anxiety.”
Jon has additional reason to feel that time is slipping away. “I went to three friends’ funerals,” he says of the deaths of his friends from AIDS. “The oldest one was 27.”
As the song reminds us (more than once), this was 1990, long after Horace told us what to do with the day, and Hillel put us on the spot about when we’d get around to it. Years later, Eckhardt Tolle would make meditating on transience seem like a more joyful, less needling experience. But Larson’s sharp, terse style puts him more in the camp of the ancients.
Granted, it’s questionable if Hillel ever said “Boom! You’re passé”.
Yet the questions are put forcefully. Matching his message, Larson’s music channels the insistent style of Stephen Sondheim, who mentored Larson in real life. If the music of, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber is a giant British trifle, Larson’s is matzo, flat and immediate, with bits that break off and cut the roof of your mouth.
Larson’s hyperawareness of time running out was sadly precocious. As the movie mentions, he lost his life suddenly due to an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm at 35 in 1996, one day before the preview of Rent.
Rent would launch Larson’s stardom, going on to run on Broadway for 12 years and gross US $280 million along the way. It’s a feat that the fictional Jon would have been over the moon to achieve.
Tick, Tick… Boom! shows the fear, but also its transcendence. Just as Rent‘s No Day But Today takes the ancient tough love that might be aimed at someone lost in their dreams, but puts it into an anthem that upholds some of those dreams (“Give in to love”), Tick, Tick… Boom! uses Jon’s anxiety to spring-load its story for giddy flights of Broadwayness. Example: when Sondheim himself makes a cameo, leaving a voicemail message that gives the beaten-down dreamer the spirit to go on.
According to EW, the real-life cameo happened due to a production emergency, when the actor playing Sondheim wasn’t available to record his new lines.
In which case, it’s the kind of showbiz, stars-align moment that gives reality a Broadway flourish, all these years (or hours) after Larson’s death.
Tick, Tick… Boom! is now streaming on Netflix.
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