![]() ![]() Those ambitions are evident here in sequences like “No More,” in which Larson imagines life in a luxury-apartment complex: A lobby fills up with a fantastical ensemble of dancing rich people, even as the movie cuts back and forth to the realities of his current run-down, very cold apartment. ![]() Their clique seems intent on both reviving MGM-style musical grandeur and finding clever ways to push movie musicals forward. Miranda reteamed with many of his collaborators from In the Heights, including that movie’s cinematographer Alice Brooks and editor Myron Kerstein (credited alongside Andrew Weisblum). They’ve revealed new colors inside - the blues and grays of Jon’s apartment and the greens and reds of his swimming pool fill in the specifics about bohemian life we are asked to only imagine in the theater. His and screenwriter Steven Levenson’s approach to adapting Tick, Tick … Boom! feels like flipping open a thrift-store jacket that wasn’t designed to be reversible, but works anyway. ![]() But Miranda, an avowed fan of Larson’s work who saw that Off Broadway version and starred in an Encores! revival in 2014, has come in and literalized and expanded the thing for the screen. (Raúl Esparza’s electric performance as Larson on that cast recording is the way many people end up becoming familiar with the show.) The standard stage version of Tick, Tick … Boom! only requires a three-person cast, and is ideal for a black-box theater - nearly abstract, facing inward, with actors taking multiple roles. But the closest thing to a definitive version was pieced together only after Larson’s death and performed Off Broadway in 2001. In real life, he moved on from Superbia to develop a different iteration of Tick, Tick … Boom! before Rent. Rather, it’s a sci-fi–slash–MTV piece called Superbia, which the actual Larson did spend years laboring over. In the show and the movie, the big musical Larson is working on … is not Rent, which would eventually break out into a massive success just after his death by an aortic aneurysm at 35, the night before its first Off Broadway preview. In the meantime, he’s fretting over a relationship with his dancer girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp), picking up shifts at a diner, and hustling through the highs and lows of bohemian lower Manhattan in the winter of 1990 there are many coats. The basic plot: A brilliant young songwriter named Jonathan Larson (played by Andrew Garfield as if there are nerve endings in each of his many curly hairs) strives to write his magnum opus, a work that will revitalize musical theater with the sounds of rock and roll and the anxieties of the moment. It’s a movie that sings, poignantly, from many times at once.Įven before getting to what Miranda and his team added to Tick, Tick … Boom!, it takes some archeological work to describe exactly what happens in the musical. The palimpsest rushed to mind while watching Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Netflix adaptation of Tick, Tick … Boom!, a movie that both meticulously restages playwright Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical and writes a new text over it with an awareness of what came next: Larson’s sudden death and his influence rippling through the art form of musical theater. You see multiple meanings from multiple eras, overlapping (and maybe a drawing of a guy jousting a slug that some monk has scribbled in the corner for fun). When you look back on a palimpsest years in the future, you can often see traces of the original writing and the later work at the same time. On a whim in college, I took a class on medieval manuscripts, where I learned about the palimpsest: a page where someone has scraped off part of the text and then written something new on top of it, probably to save valuable materials. ![]()
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