Theater Review: ‘The Jonathan Larson Project’

Anytime you revisit the work of Jonathan Larson, it feels like you also have to do some wider assessment on the state of the East Village. Is it still grungy? Are there even artists there anymore, or is it just all NYU kids and tech bros in condos? What’s left of la vie bohème, aside from branding opportunities? Larson mythologized the mid-1990s incarnation of the neighborhood with Rent, the world-conquering rock musical that changed the sound of contemporary musical theater and captured the lives of a clique of artists just as gentrification was moving that world out of lower Manhattan forever. With all these subjects — Rent, this neighborhood, and Larson in general — a rosy tint is inevitable, especially given the circumstances of his life. As you likely know, Larson died, at 35, from an aortic dissection the night before Rent was set to start previews Off Broadway.

At the top of The Jonathan Larson Project, a clip reel recaps all that Rent lore, which at this point is basically scripture for the elder-millennial musical-theater fan. The show, essentially a revue, at the Orpheum Theatre, a few blocks from the corner where Rent plays out, proposes to uncover and stage Larson’s work beyond what you may already be intimately familiar with. There are no songs from Rent, aside from the obligatory opening piano riff of “Seasons of Love” at the beginning of that clip reel, nor anything from Larson’s less-well-known autobiographical predecessor, tick, tick … BOOM! (though that’s gotten a big boost of notoriety by way of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s kinetic Netflix adaptation). The creators of The Jonathan Larson Project — including its conceiver, the theater historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper; the director, John Simpkins; and the musical director, Charlie Rosen — instead present a collection of work from Larson’s trunk. Nearly the whole show is constructed from pieces of unfinished musicals, satirical numbers written for group shows, pop songs that didn’t make it to the radio, and more.

The aim, in focusing on Larson’s offcuts, may be to deepen your understanding of the composer, though Tepper and Simpkins don’t veer far out of the realm of fandom. You’ll find an insert in your program with the names and short histories of the 18 songs that Tepper and Simpkins have assembled into The Jonathan Larson Project. But the show itself goes by without much of a lesson plan from the stage, flowing between songs without introduction or editorializing. I kept peering down in the dark trying to work out the origin of each song as it was performed. That structure maintains some momentum, though it puts the show’s aims in opposition. Are we here to learn more about Larson or simply to laud him? (The latter, mostly.)

The cast of niche musical-theater regulars — Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus, Andy Mientus, and Jason Tam — appears in boho-chic drag playing a set of ’90s-ish characters in loose, Rent-like association. The Orpheum, though, is an unforgiving shotgun apartment of a theater, its stage stranded far from most of the audience. There’s a feeling, throughout, of watching these actors try to overcome a great distance while also overcoming the fact that this is sort of Rent but isn’t. (I thought, often, of Smash’s Rent-imitator Hit List, which was written by Mietus’s character on the NBC drama.) Chanler-Berat, as a wide-eyed Larson-esque dreamer, provides the way in with “Greene Street,” an upbeat rager that Larson wrote when he was 23, before the show segues into other solos that are similarly vignettes from your city life. That’s the realm where Larson excels: his eye for a concise detail — on Greene Street, he observes “a man with a camera / His sunglasses shade his eyes” — though all the juvenilia leaves you wanting the better later work: You watch a witty-enough song like “Casual Sex, Pizza, and Beer” and spend most of the time thinking about, and wanting to hear, the greater density he’d later achieve with “La Vie Bohème.” When The Jonathan Larson Project jumps back to work like that, we get a sense of an artist with a lot of raw talent still in the process of figuring out how to hone it. That’s all part of the legend — Rent, after all, wasn’t entirely baked when Larson died, and thus it’s capped off with “Your Eyes,” a song that is textually meant to be a masterpiece and clearly is not. Presenting all these songs here as, simply, more genius work from a genius sells the complexity of his story short.

That tension is more striking when The Jonathan Larson Project swerves into his political satire. He wanted to adapt 1984 and then when he couldn’t get the rights, he wrote his own future dystopia piece named Superbia; that show’s failure became a crucial plotline within tick, tick … BOOM! “Many of Jonathan’s friends and family members have postulated that the next show Jonathan penned after Rent would have been explicitly political,” Tepper writes in a note in the program. From the sound of his other material in this vein, Larson hadn’t yet cracked the idea. The political songs we’re left with put his heart on his sleeve but aim at very broad, very 1990s targets: a send-up of political candidacy that’s about a Republican woman selling out to corporations, characters raining against “White Male World,” a futuristic housewife (in a number where Marcus has to perform some oversold prop comedy to keep the enthusiasm up) hosing down the furniture in her robotic home. Larson was great at mini-portraits of his friends and others in the city; he hadn’t yet found the same precision in his sloganeering. A big aspect of his legacy is giving musical theater that shot in the arm of energy from indie rock and pop, but that also means that he ported in those genres’ fondness for anthemic generalization. The show ends with a series of such anthems, which tend to be powerfully, earnestly sung, like “Love Heals,” a piece written for an AIDS education foundation, to the point where the speakers get blown out in the sweep of emotion. The bombast does work. You do feel, but what you feel, specifically, is harder to say.

The Jonathan Larson Project is at the Orpheum Theatre through June 1.