And then there was the one two blocks from you. I pushed for the one at Hunter College, because that’s the one I swam in during eighth grade.
Then our location manager was looking at pools for us. It’s actually more cinematic than it is stageable, and so I was, like, This is going in our movie. You realize, Oh, this only makes sense if you’re swimming at that speed. It’s a total stream-of-consciousness song.
So, the first field trip we took was to the Library of Congress, and we found the song “Swimming,” which Jonathan used to perform as part of “Boho Days.” But it was cut for the Off Broadway version, and you can see why. We began our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, discussing a scene in which Jonathan, after banging his head against an unwritten song, goes swimming in a public pool and has a musical epiphany mid-lap. He had just come from a “brief but vigorous game of handball,” and we got to talking about the artistic life, the difficulties of success, and the strange circumstances that created “Tick, Tick . . . When I spoke to Miranda recently, over Zoom, he was at his home office, in Washington Heights, which looked a lot like Jonathan’s in the film-keyboard by the window, busy bookshelves-with the exception of a few Tony and Grammy Awards. Miranda has expanded what was once a solo show even further, re-creating Larson’s bohemian New York of 1990 and employing a sprawling cast led by Andrew Garfield, as Jonathan. Boom!,” his directorial début, which arrives on Netflix this week. Miranda has now followed up “Hamilton” with a film version of “Tick, Tick . . . Like Larson, he would hustle through the theatre world in his twenties before writing a transformative Broadway hit in his thirties-but, unlike Larson, he lived to see it conquer the world. One of the audience members was a college senior named Lin-Manuel Miranda. The show was now a portrait of an artist on the cusp of global success, unaware that the acclaim he longed for would coincide with his death, and the ticking clock took on a prescient new meaning. Boom!” into a three-person Off Broadway musical.
He died in 1996, of an aortic aneurysm, hours before the first scheduled Off Broadway performance of “Rent.”įive years later, the playwright David Auburn adapted “Tick, Tick . . .
Soon after, Larson did write a breakthrough musical, but he didn’t live to see its success. “They’re singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ / You just want to lay down and cry,” Larson sang. The “Tick, Tick” of the title was the insistent warning in his ears-after all, his idol, Stephen Sondheim, had opened his first Broadway show when he was twenty-seven. Boom!” Larson, accompanied by a band, sat at a piano and griped, in song, about his stalled career and his desperation for a breakout hit. The next year, it was renamed “Tick, Tick . . . When Jonathan Larson wrote it, he was a struggling theatre composer facing down his thirtieth birthday, despondent after years of rejection for his dystopian rock musical, “Superbia.” In the fall of 1990, Larson workshopped a new one-man show, originally titled “Boho Days,” about a frustrated composer named Jonathan who was turning thirty.