Celebrating Jonathan Larson, Creator of ‘Rent,’ in a New Show Off Broadway

In his Tony-winning musical, “Rent,” Jonathan Larson asked: “How do you measure a year in the life?”

The question took on an even heavier weight, with striking resonance, after Larson died unexpectedly at the age of 35 in 1996, hours before the show’s first preview.

In the years after, dozens of his unheard songs were discovered, revealing the inner workings of a prolific artist looking for his big break. Now, a new musical, “The Jonathan Larson Project,” celebrates those songs and raises a new question: How do you thread together snippets of Jonathan Larson’s creative output into a musical?

“It was like an expedition,” the show’s creator, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, said of what it was like to pore over the archive of Larson’s work at the Library of Congress. “Like a musical theater historian expedition, because you would go and you would find one lyric that sort of matched up with one demo that sort of matched up with an idea of another notebook.”

The show is a collage of Larson’s life as told through his unproduced music, some of it written when he was as young as 22, including compositions for downtown revues and cabarets, music from Larson’s futuristic dystopian musical “Superbia” and songs cut from “Rent” and “Tick, Tick … Boom!”

The new show, which is in previews and opens March 10 at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village, has been years in the making. It evolved from a 2018 song cycle that Tepper staged at 54 Below, a basement cabaret club where she is the creative and programming director. Partly a tribute to Larson, the musical is also its own universal story of the artist’s struggle: surviving in an unforgiving city, plumbing the depths of lived experience to create something authentic, weathering rejection after rejection.

On a recent afternoon at one of Larson’s old haunts, the Ear Inn on Spring Street, another question hung in the air: Who is Laurie?

A former lover? A fictitious archetype? She’s just one of the many mysteries in the hundreds of cassette tapes, scripts and music demos the writer left behind.

Over turkey burgers and beer, Tepper, the director John Simpkins, the music supervisor Charlie Rosen and the actors Adam Chanler-Berat and Taylor Iman Jones discussed what it took to produce a cohesive musical out of disparate songs and material, and what it means to keep Larson’s legacy alive.

There’s something of a mystique to Larson. (“Kind of a weird juju about it,” as Jones put it. “That’s positive. Things just keep falling in place.”) So it was fitting that we met at the Ear Inn and, later, visited Larson’s old apartment (thanks to a generous current tenant), where he lived for 12 years, and died.

Larson, who brought humanity to myriad social issues like addiction and homophobia, never shied away from politics. In songs like “White Male World,” written in 1991, and “The Truth Is a Lie,” written in 1990, Larson’s lyrics feel eerily familiar in today’s culture.

“What emerged immediately was this connection between the time in which he was writing and right now,” Simpkins said. “And so to us, we became immediately interested in the dialogue that we could have between Jonathan, the time in which Jonathan was writing, and the time in which we find ourselves right now.”

In one tongue-in-cheek political campaign scene, Larson lists “Trump Industries” as a corporate Republican sponsor.

“We haven’t changed a word,” Tepper said. “The idea is not to fix something he wrote or to make it relevant, it’s to do what he wrote and to honor it.”

In “Likability/La Di Da,” a song about political candidates bending to the whims of voters and so-called experts, Larson uses the phrase “Make America great.” He wrote it in 1989, perhaps as a nod to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan.

Are we past our prime?
Or is this the time
To climb from the slime
Make America great
Are we so hollow
That we blindly follow
And swallow
Whatever they put on our plate?

If the Larson mystique wasn’t already present, there were coincidences that, despite Tepper’s avoidance of what she called “woo woo” tendencies, did seem auspicious.

Shortly after rehearsals started, one of the actors, Lauren Marcus, returned home to find that of the dozens of posters on her wall, one was missing. Her “Rent” poster had slipped to the ground. Not long after, Tepper’s “Jonathan Larson Project” poster, which she’d had on her wall since 2018, fell to the ground in an impossible-to-reach spot behind a bookshelf (where it remains). Later, they realized that the show’s load-in day at the Orpheum took place on what would have been Larson’s 65th birthday.

“The Jonathan Larson Project” — called a “project” for its range of genres and story lines — supplements its minimalist set with video footage of SoHo to ground the show in today’s Manhattan. But it’s also awash in nostalgia.

“You can lean into the homage, right?” Jones said. “Like, I don’t necessarily need to play Mimi in a song,” she said, referring to a “Rent” character she has played before in community productions, “but I don’t need to shy away from Mimi-isms or ‘Rent’-isms. It’s hard to describe, but I definitely feel there’s like a ‘Rent’ method of acting. It’s really fun to lean into that.”

After years of delays — because of the pandemic shutdown and the time it took to book the right theater — getting the musical to the Orpheum stage happened at lighting speed. The venue was confirmed in late November, then rehearsals began in January, and previews started this month.

It was fueled by fandom and discovery from the start. Back in 2014, Tepper chose five songs, largely unheard by the public, for a concert in the New York City Center lobby ahead of an Encores! performance of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” The response was so enthusiastic, from “Rentheads” and new fans alike, that she began dreaming of expanding the concert into an evening-length work.

She checked in with Larson’s family, who gave her the green light.

“They said, like, go for it, kid,” Tepper said.

She deepened her research and in 2016 started taking the train to Washington to dig through Larson’s collection at the Library of Congress, where she would spend the entire day completely immersed in his journals and music demos.

When she found the song “Greene Street,” she was so overcome that she left the library, sat outside and cried, in awe that it had gone virtually unheard.

“It was like the wildest, wildest dream of being a fan,” she said.

In 2018, a show was born. Tepper staged a 12-performance run of “The Jonathan Larson Project,” a longer song cycle version of the City Center event, at 54 Below.

The show featured five actors and a band — as does “The Jonathan Larson Project” today — who recorded the songs as an album the following year.

“It’s a little bit of, like, a seance when the composer is no longer with you,” said Rosen, the musical supervisor. “You don’t want it to be a pastiche,” he added.

Tasked with orchestrating and co-arranging, Rosen looked to Larson’s musical influences, the time period and the many genres in his work to piece things together — and make it relevant.

Thankfully, the quality of Larson’s demos helped. “The fact that he even had the ability to record a piano and then go back and record his voice over the already recorded piano,” Rosen said, “most people didn’t have access to that then.”

Larson, Tepper said, felt his work was incomplete without instrumentation beyond piano. Arranging his songs with a full band is a way of finishing what he started, a production quality Larson simply couldn’t afford.

“When I listen to this music, I hear it as a survival guide for getting through hard times,” said Chanler-Berat, who plays a version of Larson’s characters and himself. “And I mean that as an artist, but I also mean that as a citizen.”

The artist’s life that Larson lived in the ’80s and ’90s looks a little different today. There’s a Sweetgreen around the corner from his apartment on Greenwich Street. The view he once had of the Hudson River has been replaced with a towering glass building. There is no trace of the phone booth that once sat across the street, where, in the absence of a functional buzzer, Larson’s visitors would call to have him throw down a key to the building.

But at its core, as his music transmits, the trials artists face is the same: finding the time to create; mustering the resolve to flout traditional expectations of success; staying financially afloat and cutting through the dull rhythm of manual labor or the fog of corporate malaise to excavate what alights the soul.

“Oh piano,” Larson croons in an unfinished song, “you saved my soul again. Oh piano, you saved my soul, amen.”