Jonathan Larson

Jonathan David Larson, born February 4, 1960, in Mount Vernon, New York, was an American composer, lyricist, and playwright whose family was from White Plains, New York. His grandfather, Bernard Isaac Lazarson, who was born in Russia, changed the family surname to Larson. Larson's family was Jewish, and he grew up with a sister, Julie. From an early age he played trumpet and tuba, sang in his school choir, and took piano lessons. His musical influences ranged from rock musicians such as Elton John, The Doors, The Who, Billy Joel, Pete Townshend, The Police, Prince, Liz Phair, and The Beatles to the classic composers of musical theatre, with Stephen Sondheim holding particular importance among the latter. At White Plains High School, Larson also pursued acting, taking on lead roles in various productions before graduating in 1978.

He went on to attend Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, on a four-year scholarship as an acting major, graduating in 1982 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. During his college years he began composing, writing music for small student productions known as cabarets and later scoring a musical called The Book of Good Love, written by his mentor and department head Jacques Burdick. He also co-wrote Sacrimmoralinority, a Brechtian-themed cabaret musical, with fellow student David Glenn Armstrong. First staged at Adelphi in the winter of 1981, the piece was later renamed Saved! - An Immoral Musical on the Moral Majority after the two graduated, and ran for four weeks at Rusty's Storefront Blitz on 42nd Street in Manhattan, earning both writers an ASCAP writing award. Following graduation, Larson participated in a summer stock program at the Barn Theatre in Augusta, Michigan, as a piano player, through which he earned an Actors' Equity Association card. He subsequently stepped away from acting to concentrate on composition.

In 1983, Larson planned a musical adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, intending to stage it in 1984, but the Orwell estate denied him permission. He redirected that work into an original futuristic story titled Superbia. The project won both the Richard Rodgers Production Award and the Richard Rodgers Development Grant, and received performances at Playwrights Horizons as well as a rock concert version produced by Victoria Leacock at the Village Gate in September 1989, though it never achieved a full production. Material from Superbia later surfaced in other contexts: the song "Come to Your Senses" was incorporated into the 2001 three-person stage version of tick, tick... BOOM!, "LCD Readout" appeared on the 2007 album Jonathan Sings Larson, "One of These Days" was included on the 2019 album The Jonathan Larson Project, and an abridged "Sextet Montage" was released as a streaming single on February 4, 2022.

Completed in 1991, tick, tick... BOOM! was an autobiographical rock monologue written for Larson alone, accompanied by a piano and rock band, drawing on his feelings of rejection following the disappointment of Superbia. It was performed off-Broadway at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village and later at the Second Stage Theater on the Upper West Side, with both productions produced by Victoria Leacock. After Larson's death, Leacock and Robyn Goodman, with the Larson family's permission, brought in playwright David Auburn to work through Larson's five versions of the monologue and expand it for three actors, with Stephen Oremus serving as orchestrator and musical director. The expanded stage version premiered off-Broadway in 2001, with Raúl Esparza playing Larson in a performance that earned him an Obie Award. The show subsequently received a West End production. A film adaptation directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, with a script rewritten by Steven Levenson and starring Andrew Garfield in an Academy Award-nominated performance as Larson, was released on Netflix on November 12, 2021.

In 1989, Larson began collaborating with playwright Billy Aronson on a musical that updated Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème to contemporary New York City. Larson conceived the title Rent and re-centered the story in the East Village, reflecting the lives of artists and young people living in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. The show underwent development at the New York Theatre Workshop beginning with staged readings in 1993 and a three-week studio production in late 1994, with producer Jeffrey Seller becoming a key champion of the project during that period. On January 25, 1996, the morning of Rent's first off-Broadway preview performance at the New York Theatre Workshop, Larson collapsed in his apartment kitchen after returning from a production meeting at approximately 12:30 a.m. His roommate discovered him at around 3 a.m., called emergency services, and attempted CPR. Police pronounced Larson dead at the scene at age 35, with the cause of death determined to be an aortic dissection.

In the days before his death, Larson had experienced chest and back pain, fever, dizziness, and shortness of breath. He had been assessed at Cabrini Medical Center on January 21 and at St. Vincent's Hospital on January 23, where doctors attributed his symptoms variously to stress, food poisoning, or a virus and found nothing of concern in his electrocardiograms, though one doctor's note speculated about a possible myocardial infarction without further investigation. A court later found that Larson had been misdiagnosed at both hospitals, and a medical malpractice lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount. The New York State Department of Health also launched an investigation into the matter.

Rent proceeded following his death, earning critical and popular success before transferring to Broadway's Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996, where it became one of the longest-running productions in Broadway history. The show was also adapted into a film in 2005. Larson posthumously received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1996, along with three Tony Awards that year, including the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and the Tony Award for Best Original Score.