It was the morning of the first Off-Broadway preview of Rent. There, he put water on the stove to make tea and unexpectedly died from an aortic aneurism.
Afterwards, he went to the back of the theater to do an interview with Anthony Tommasini, a critic at the Times, which you can still read here, and headed home at around 12:30 a.m.
Tik tik boom full#
24, 1996, Larson went to Rent’s final dress rehearsal, which took place in front of a full audience. He moved forward with the show, and on Jan. He ended up going to the emergency room twice, but doctors found nothing wrong. During one tech rehearsal, Larson collapsed in the back of the theater. But in the lead-up to the show, Larson began having chest pains and nausea, according to his friends and co-workers in the documentary. New York Theatre Workshop became the first theater to produce Rent, allowing Larson to officially quit his job at the Moondance Diner. Aronson and Larson eventually parted ways, and Larson moved forward on what would become Rent, alone. Playwright Billy Aronson had originally approached Larson about the musical, which would be set in modern-day New York City during the AIDS epidemic. Then after tick, tick.Boom!, Larson returned to a project he had previously shelved, an adaptation of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème, which tells the story of two poor artists living in Paris. According to the Post, Seller wrote Larson a letter that read: “Your work–music, lyrics, and spoken word–has an emotional power and resonance that I have rarely experienced in the theatre.”
Theater producer Jeffrey Seller, who’d go on to work on musicals like In the Heights and Hamilton, attended a production of the show and told Larson he wanted to produce his musicals. Nobody could tell him it’s too big.” He started working on a one-man show, which was eventually named tick, tick.Boom! The title refers to the “twin ticking clocks of his potential and his friend’s life, both of which he feared might be about to run out,” per Vox, as Larson had already lost several friends to the AIDS crisis and his real-life best friend had told him he’d contracted HIV. “So he went to work on a show that was just him, a piano and a band. “Jonathan was devastated by that,” his sister Julie told the New York Post. As Vox reports, Larson was “feeling bitter that every producer who came to his Superbia workshop had told him that it was both too expensive to mount Off-Broadway and too weird to mount on Broadway.” As we see in the film, legendary composer Stephen Sondheim came to a workshop of the musical, but it was never produced. He had paid gigs here and there and worked for a long time on a futuristic musical called Superbia. Larson spent years working as a waiter at the Moondance Diner in Manhattan in order to earn money while he was writing and composing. Garfield as Larson in tick, tick.Boom! MACALL POLAY/NETFLIX © 2021 Creating tick, tick.Boom! Just as Garfield proclaims in tick, tick.Boom!, Larson’s sister says in the documentary that Larson would tell people he was going to change the face of American musical theater. After graduating, he moved to New York City to focus on writing. He eventually attended Adelphi University to study acting and also began creating his own music. In the beginning of the film, Larson’s family paint a picture of his childhood growing up in White Plains, New York, where he was in the school band and chorus and starred in his high school productions.
In 2006, a documentary about the making of Rent titled No Day But Today: The Story of ‘Rent’was released, featuring interviews with Larson’s parents, sister, cousins, friends, and former co-workers. Below, more about the legendary playwright, including what happened in those final days of his life. Now with tick, tick.Boom!, Miranda helps Larson’s legacy live on. “I grew up in a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood in Upper Manhattan that burst with music and characters, and ‘Rent’ whispered to me, ‘Your stories are just as valid as the ones in the shows you’ve seen.’” Then when he saw tick, tick.Boom! a few years later, the show “grabbed the 21-year old me and refused to let go,” he wrote.īut Miranda was never able to meet Larson, who tragically passed away in 1996 the night before the first public performance of Rent at the New York Theatre Workshop. “More than anything, it gave me permission to write about my community,” Miranda wrote in the New York Timesin 2014. Miranda has long been a fan of Larson’s work, telling publications over the years that seeing Rent on his 17th birthday was a life-changing moment for him as an artist.
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