Jonathan Larson life and biography

Jonathan Larson (born February 4, 1960 – died January 25, 1996) was an American composer and playwright noted for the serious social issues of multiculturalism, addiction, homophobia, and AIDS explored in his work. Typical examples of his use of these themes are found in his works, Rent and tick, tick... BOOM!. He received three posthumous Tony Awards and a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the opera Rent.


Sidelights

Until his death in early 1996 at the age of thirty-five, composer, playwright, and lyricist Jonathan Larson was the force behind the award-winning Rent, a rock opera that since its off-Broadway premier in 1996 has been one of the largest lights on Broadway. Larson aspired to reinvent the musical for a younger generation of theatergoers, and Rent was billed as "The Rock Opera of the Nineties." The work is loosely based on the opera La Boheme by Puccini and includes more than thirty songs in an eclectic array of musical styles, among them electric rock, salsa, Motown, be-bop, reggae, gospel, and more classical operatic counterpoint. Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times quoted Larson on the nature of the show: "It's not how many years you live, but how you fulfill the time you spend here. That's sort of the point of the show." They were prophetic words, for Larson died of an aortic aneurysm the day before Rent was slated to premier at the New York Theater Workshop. This "rousing, moving, scathingly funny show, performed by a cast of youthful unknowns with explosive talent and staggering energy, has brought a shocking jolt of creative juice to Broadway," lauded Jack Kroll in Newsweek.

Larson grew up in White Plains, New York, and attended Adelphi University. There he studied acting and wrote songs for the college cabaret, music for films, and songs for children's television, including the long-running public television show Sesame Street. For ten years Larson worked as a waiter at the Moondance Diner in New York City's SoHo district to support himself while he pursued his musical interests. Prior to creating Rent, Larson had written and composed several musicals--J. P. Morgan Saves the Nation and Superbia--and the rock monologue Tick, Tick . . . Boom!, which he performed himself. Yet it was due to Rent that Larson was finally able to quit his day job.

As a child Larson had seen a children's version of La Boheme performed by puppets. That event, combined with his own life and artistic friends in the East Village of New York City, spurred his interest in the classic tale. He analyzed the libretto of La Boheme, based on writings by French author Henri Murger, and wondered what the modern equivalents of the opera's characters would be. Larson wrote several songs for his intended opera, recorded them himself, and in 1992 gave the tape to James Nicola at the New York Theater Workshop. Nicola immediately recognized Larson's talent, and the four-year process of mounting a new show began. A Richard Rodgers award for $50,000 helped the process along, and in 1994 a workshop production was established.

Although the complicated plot of Rent tells eight different stories, the action is unified by a rent strike in an apartment building in New York City. The cast of characters includes: Roger, a punk rocker sporting dyed-blond hair who is recovering from heroin addiction and mourning the loss of his girlfriend who committed suicide when she discovered that she had AIDS; fellow tenant Mark Cohen, a smart video artist who delves into his work after ex-girlfriend Maureen, a performance artist, leaves him for a gay lover; and Tom Collins, an HIV-positive, gay, black man who is assaulted on the street and helped by Angel Dumott Schunard, a transvestite who is also HIV-positive. Tom and Angel fall for each other and become a couple. When a power outage in the apartment building where Roger lives forces another tenant, Mimi, a club dancer dying from AIDS, to his door for help, she and Roger fall in love as well. In the words of Kroll, "Larson exalts love as the force that binds his characters into an extended family who care for each other with all the many varieties of love, from sex to friendship to compassion."

Theater critics found much to praise in Rent, including Larson's ability as a lyricist and composer. "Larson is certainly not the first composer to take aim at that elusive target [the rock opera of the nineties]," noted John Lahr in the New Yorker, "but he may be the first to have hit it. His gift for direct, compelling, colloquial lyrical statement seems to prove that the show tune can once again become both pertinent and popular." "Three songs . . . are as passionate, unpretentious, and powerful as anything I've heard in the musical theatre for more than a decade," lauded Lahr. "[H]is talent and his big heart are impossible to miss. His songs spill over with feeling and ideas; his work is both juicy and haunting." Kroll maintained, "Like all the best popular art, Rent dares you to feel sentimental, showing how sentimentality can be turned into an exultant sweetness without which life is a grim mechanism." Lahr surmised, "[Larson] uncovers the poignancy in his characters' panic--a manic quality that suits rock's electrified sound."

Larson was a longtime fan of the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, one of the masters of the genre. For some time Sondheim had been watching Larson develop as a lyricist and composer. Tommasini quoted Sondheim, who applauded Larson for trying "to blend contemporary pop music with theater music, which doesn't work very well; he was on his way to finding a real synthesis." Sondheim explained, "A good deal of pop music has interesting lyrics, but they are not theater lyrics." A songwriter for the theater "must have a sense of what is theatrical, of how you use music to tell a story, as opposed to writing a song. Jonathan understood that instinctively."

Several critics remarked on technical aspects of the production, some finding fault with the overall structure of the action and the pacing. "[O]ne forgives the show's intermittent lapses into awkwardness or clich because of its overwhelming emotional sincerity," commented Ben Brantley of the New York Times. "And when the whole ensemble stands at the edge of the stage, singing fervently about the ways of measuring borrowed time, the heart both breaks and soars." Maintaining that it is the work's "wit and emotional conviction . . . that lifts Rent well above the synthetic, cleverly packaged herd of Broadway musical reviews and revivals," Brantley stated that the show "restores spontaneity and depth of feeling to a discipline that sorely needs them. People who complain about the demise of the American musical have simply been looking in the wrong places."


AWARDS

Richard Rodgers Development Grant and Stephen Sondheim Award, both for Superbia; Richard Rodgers Studio Production Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1994, for the workshop version of Rent; Antoinette Perry Awards for best musical, best original score, and best book of a musical, and Pulitzer Prize, all 1996, all for Rent.

CAREER

Playwright, composer, and lyricist. Songwriter for television shows, including Sesame Street, PBS. Worked as a waiter at Moondance Diner, New York City, for ten years.

WRITINGS:
THEATER

* Rent (musical), produced off-Broadway at New York Theater Workshop, then at Nederlander Theatre, 1996.

Also wrote the musicals J. P. Morgan Saves the Nation and Superbia and the one-man show 30/90.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Tick, Tick . . . Boom!, a play written by David Auburn, is a musical based on Larson's one-man show, 30/90; Rent was adapted as a film, written by Steve Chbosky, directed by Chris Columbus, and released by Revolution Studios, 2005.

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