Lin-Manuel Miranda | Tick, Tick... Boom! / 2021

pavane for a dead musical

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steven Levenson (screenplay, based on Tick, Tick... Boom! by Jonathan Larson), Lin-Manuel Miranda (director) Tick, Tick... Boom! / 2021

 

I put off seeing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first film, Tick, Tick... Boom! until the day before the Academy Awards ceremony for which actor Andrew Garfield was nominated as an actor for his role as the composer / lyricist Jonathan Larson.

      Of course, I’d been working on the larger project of My Queer Cinema series, focusing on the early years, which easily explains my delay in watching Miranda’s movie; but I must admit that also I just couldn’t get up the energy to see another Larson-based work since I find the whole issue of this obviously talented but highly flawed Broadway figure problematic.

      To my surprise, I was quite charmed by the film, a retelling with a scaffolding shell of historical context of his unproduced autobiographical musical, Tick, Tick... Boom! And I now realize what my difficulties have been in discussing Larson’s substantial contribution to Broadway theater history through his 1996 musical Rent, which alas he did not even get the full opportunity to see, dying of an aortic aneurysm the day before previews were to begin.

      This fact and that much of Larson’s work and life was concerned precisely with the difficulties of realizing a “new” kind of rock musical theater worked together with the appealing quality of the work itself—Rent based loosely on Puccini’s La Bohème—helped to turn the Larson work into a phenomenal hit both on stage and on screen. And the fact that now Miranda, having himself created a new kind of Broadway musical Hamilton, was directing a musical about the difficulties of making a musical, the subject matter of Tick, Tick being the attempts of Larson to bring together a production of his first musical, Superbia, all seemed to come together in a confluence of shared interests that seemed destined to become something of interest and importance.

     And I can report that indeed this film is precisely that, of deep interest and importance. Anyone who loves Broadway musicals, as do I who grew up intimately knowing their history (even though I lived far away from Broadway in a small town in Iowa), will be fascinated with and even emotionally moved by the Miranda-Larson cinema.

     Garfield’s absolutely spell-binding cyclone of a performance, moreover, will surely effect any viewer who has even imagined what it must have been like to be Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Ira and George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Frank Loesser, E. Y. Harburg and Burton Lane, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Jule Style, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Jerry Herman, Meredith Willson, and, Larson’s own mentor and quiet supporter, Stephen Sondheim in trying to bring a very personal vision into reality by working with hundreds of directors, actors, dancers, designers, choreographers, musicians, light and set designers, and numerous others to give delight to their audiences. Perhaps, as in my case, even a few tears might flow when this herculean task is played out against the personal life of the composer/lyricist as it is in this movie.

     There have been lots of movies made about Broadway composers, directors, and audiences, but few have presented it from such a personal viewpoint.

    Before I describe that world, I should perhaps mention my own very small part of Larson’s history by simply mentioning that in 1995, a year before Rent, my own Sun & Moon Press published Jeffrey M. Jones’ book with music by Larson, J. P. Morgan Saves the Nation, first produced by En Garde Arts by Anne Hamburger that same year, which may have helped to momentarily sustain this poverty-stricken artist and may even paid him a few dollars.

      Clearly poverty, as it was in Rent, is very much at the center of Tick, Tick. Throughout the work Jonathan receives numerous bills for electricity and other costs which he simply cannot pay on his small salary as a waiter in the Moondance Diner, where much of the action of the work occurs, and some of his closest friends are employed. Money unfortunately is very much at the heart of both this work and Rent, and Larson and his Bohemian friends struggle just to get through each day, living at times on top of one another in a shared mess of an apartment. How do you write in such circumstances?

      His best friend and former roommate, Michael (Robin de Jesús), a gay man, has finally called it quits with theater, moving to a prestigious advertising firm which allows him to live without financial worries and allows him a new car and a glorious new apartment, the subject of one of the musical’s songs, “No More,” where the two friends, visiting Michael’s apartment, dance a lovely duet in the empty room with a spectacular view. Michael is constantly tempting Jonathan to join him in a world in which he will not have to live as a destitute man, repeating over and over again, as Jonathan sings in another the musical’s songs, the painful process of “trying it get it right.”

      At one point, to help buy him some musicians for the workshop performance of his musical, Jonathan even joins others in an advertising focus group, wonderfully putting his creative mind to work until he’s told of the terrible side-effects of the product they are trying to sell, at which point he disrupts the group’s activities and his chances at any further extra money. Broadway musical star Laura Benanti plays one of his fellow advertising focus group members.

      His inability to pay the electric bill results in a complete blackout on the last night he has left to write the musical’s important missing Act II song, whose process of creating becomes one of the work’s central themes, particularly since it comes between everyone who loves him, including Michael, Jonathan’s girlfriend Susan Wilson (Alexandra Shipp), and his inattentive agent Rosa Stevens (Judith Light), the latter of whom shows no signs of love except to advise him later, when the entire musical seems as if it will never possibly be made, to write another one, and another, and another until something “sticks”—a formidable and almost impossible challenge that ultimately with be Larson’s fate.

       The second major force in Larson’s work is time. It is time, he bemoans, that is helping to cause all of his angst, as in a few days, on February 4th, 1990, the date repeated again and again through this work, is Jonathan’s 30th birthday, a date he is obsessed with since by that time Sondheim had already written a musical, and he has still done nothing.

       And, of course, it is time, the impossible pressure of time, that is behind the “tick...tick” of the bomb that keeps promising to explode in his face throughout this musical production. Jonathan has only a few days to finish his song before the Wednesday Playwrights Horizons workshop performance and, just as important, to make a decision whether or not to join his girlfriend Susan in her movie to Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshire’s where she has been offered a position with the dance troupe as a teacher/creator.

       There is no question that such a figure as Jonathan with Broadway theater in his blood, can never move out of Manhattan, but he cannot bring himself to tell the woman he loves that truth and cannot explain his decision to her without the fear of losing her forever; she equally wants to pursue her career but also would love to have him come to the decision that he does not want her to leave. The dilemma sits in suspense through much of the work, issues represented in the song “Johnny Can’t Decide” until resolved comically in the musical’s duet, “Therapy,” a duet sung by the fictional couple at the same moment Jonathan and Susan battle it out in real time not so very successfully.

       In 1990 also the life-and-death concerns that gay and sympathetic filmmakers were expressing since the mid-1980s also came into crisis in the plague of AIDS. When Jonathan’s diner co-worker Freddy is hospitalized with another fever attack, not only do his fellow workers realize that his time to live is shortening, but they bemoan their own lack of time, since they are forced to serve up the Sunday brunch with only the two of them, doctors not even allowing them to visit him to demonstrate their support and love.

      Being about theater, Larson’s musical is filled with musical references and his work is often imitative as is the wonderful song “Sunday” that is sung in counterpose to their harried waiting duties, which openly imitates scenes from Sunday in the Park with George as the servers attempt to establish their own grace, balance, calm with a chorus of cameo diners that includes Hamilton stars Reneé Elise Goldsberry, Rent stars Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin Vega, MJ Rodriguez, and William Jermaine Heredia, and Broadway legends Bebe Neuwirth, Brian Stokes Mitchell, André de Shields, Chita Rivera, Joel Gray, Bernadette Peters (who was also the star of Sunday in the Park), Chuck Cooper (A Life, Chicago, Passion, and other musicals), and Howard McGillan (The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Phantom of the Opera). With its multiple interstices of references this number is memorable to anyone who loves musical theater.

      If time haunts our hero, however, it even more fully haunts his best friend Michael, who when Jonathan dismisses his desires to take part in the good life, accusing him of not making time for the things that truly matter, finally admits that he too is HIV-positive. In both this work and in Rent the misnomer of the “gay disease” is killing off many of the most talented individuals of the age.  

    Some gay commentators have accused Larson, who was not gay, as being insincere in even incorporating this subject into his work, but I find such observations ridiculous; anyone who observes the people around dying of that disease can be just as thoroughly involved and concerned as gay men. If AIDS is not a gay disease, then it cannot be simply a homosexual issue. And Larson’s gay figures, who are very much at the center of his work, are for the most part sympathetically portrayed.

      Finally, of course, it is an issue of love. How does one with the ego it takes to creates a community to perform a musical opera, show love to those around him. Focused throughout on creating a beautiful song to express his love of Susan, “Come to Your Senses,” he apparently has no time to act on that love. And the woman who sings it is the actor Karessa Johnson (Vanessa Hudgens), not Susan herself—a situation resolved in the film by having Jonathan imagine it as being sung by his lover at the same time it’s sung, often in duet form, with Johnson. And it is not until he has nearly lost all of his best friends, including Michael, that Jonathan discovers in the song “Why” just how important love is in keeping it all together. He races to Michael’s apartment to offer to be there for him at all times.

      It’s a moving story about the impossible pushes and pulls of musical theater life, with the rewards, in this case, of only a few encouraging words by the real-life Stephen Sondheim (played here by Bradley Whitford; although some of Sondheim’s real voice is used the telephone message recording). But, strangely, Tick...Tick also represents another kind of bomb, the one going off in the real world of musical theater as it slowly crawls into its own coffin.

      Instead of the personal, musicals have increasingly sought out the generic, the kind of Disneyfied worlds of not only the Disney productions, but musicals such as Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and even the Baum Wizard of Oz classics that retell classic tales in a safe, operatic manner that make them Hallmark Card-friendly.

      The kind of theater that Larson, and perhaps Miranda, advocates for is highly personal, coming from the deep soul of the creator, but is quickly being replaced (and, in fact, had been replaced, other than the work of Sondheim and a few others) by 1990. It is that true original passion that surely Sondheim perceived in Larson’s early works. The trouble, however, is that often Larson’s lyrics, as original and clever as they often are, remain so very personal that they sometimes strain to appeal for anything beyond the moment, as “Green Green Dress,” a fact of which Larson even slightly mocks in his quick rendition of “Sugar.” Often the lyrics don’t even take the narrative from one song to another, and, although wittily written, don’t chime with any but the most momentary of situations. Hence, the cabaret style theater in which Miranda has structured this work (not incidentally so very different from the manner in which Irwin Winkler structured his tribute to Cole Porter in De-Lovely, a movie I thought terribly underrated). I have no problem with the cabaret style, after all, Kander and Ebb have structured some of their best works very similarly, but since Larson’s focus is the highly subjective present, instead of the past as in the works of Winkler, Kander, and Ebb, it somehow displaces the immediacy of his situations, particularly when the narrator is embedded within yet another narration outside of Larson’s world, as it is in this movie.

     But even in Rent the story seems to keep shifting from its emblematic tale of the Bohemian past to the immediacy of the current issues of 1995 concerning AIDS, homelessness, and homophobia that literally “rents” or “tears” the work at its seams.

       For all the passion and personalization of Larson’s concerns, moreover, in the end they are rather banal and unoriginal. Dramatists and filmmakers such as Mac Wellman and Canadian filmmaker John Greyson were combining music and contemporary concerns in far more radical ways in the same period—but admittedly they not reach the vast audiences of Larson’s Rent or Miranda’s Hamilton.

      Finally, creating a rock musical, surely as Larson realized, was not a new concept. And ultimately—although he doesn’t compose in the 2-3 note range with 1-4 harmonic phrases that I have noted in many popular theater musicals since 1970—his compositions do not represent a wide range of the musical spectrum. Larson is simply not a great composer. And most of his songs are not something anyone might go home humming. Finally, of course, I must admit I am not of the audience either he or, by extension, Miranda is most seeking, the MTV generation in Larson’s case and the rap music lovers of Miranda’s experiment. These forms, given my classical music background, truly seem simplistic and delimited given the range of the musical spectrum to which my ears are attuned.

    Nonetheless, this film made me want to view Rent once more, and this time, of course, I will review it.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).