What makes The Jonathan Larson Project, playing at Southwark Playhouse Borough, remarkable is the way it brings together songs once buried in drawers and archives, including unfinished works, and gives them a new life on stage.
In 1996, composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) died at the age of 35. His rock musical Rent was finally about to meet an audience after more than three years of readings and workshops. On the morning before its first Off-Broadway preview, Larson died suddenly from an aortic dissection. He never lived to see the success of the work to which he had devoted so much of his life. Rent went on to transfer to Broadway, winning the Pulitzer Prize and multiple Tony Awards, and securing its place in musical theatre history.
Now playing at Southwark Playhouse Borough in London, The Jonathan Larson Project opens with a video montage of people singing Rent’s best-known song, ‘Seasons of Love’. “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes…” Children and adults sing in English and other languages, a reminder of just how far the song has travelled over the past 30 years. What follows is archival news footage reporting the sudden death of the 35-year-old composer. His songs have lived on for three decades, but the life of the man who wrote them remains frozen in January 1996.
ⓒDanny Kaan
Life is hardly easy now, but New York in the 1980s and 90s was no easy place for a young artist either. Perhaps that was precisely the environment from which Rent could emerge. Larson relocated Puccini’s La Bohème to New York’s East Village in the 1990s, using the lives and loves of struggling young artists to reflect the society around them. Poverty, soaring rents, AIDS, sexuality, gender and race all became part of its world. Rather than grand heroes, Rent put the personal lives of ordinary young people on stage, and its honesty struck a chord with a generation of audiences.
Listening to the previously unheard songs in The Jonathan Larson Project, there are frequent echoes of Rent, both in mood and musical language. One word in particular keeps returning: ‘free’. The desire to live freely while feeling anything but free in the city runs through several of the songs. Another depicts the grim realities of life in New York, complete with rats. Poverty, city life and the longing for freedom run through these songs, and the world that would later become so familiar in Rent is already taking shape in them.
The Jonathan Larson Project takes the form of a collection of songs rather than a continuous narrative. Five performers take turns singing Larson’s songs, revealing the creative world of a single composer. Each song has its own voice and situation rather than contributing to a continuous storyline, and at times the evening can feel loose if approached with the expectations of a fully formed musical. Yet as songs written at different points in Larson’s life come together, a portrait gradually begins to emerge: a young artist trying to survive in New York, falling in love, getting angry and wanting to change the world. Across 18 songs, it is Larson’s voice that ultimately holds them together.
What makes The Jonathan Larson Project remarkable is the way it brings together songs once buried in drawers and archives, including unfinished works, and gives them a new life on stage. Theatre historian and producer Jennifer Ashley Tepper conceived the project. Songs Larson had written but cut from musicals, pieces created for small cabaret performances, and unfinished work remained unheard for years. After Larson’s papers were donated to the Library of Congress in 2003, Tepper explored the archive and brought together 18 of these songs. The project was first presented as a concert in 2018, followed by a studio album. Following an Off-Broadway run last year, the production has now arrived in London, directed by John Simpkins.
There is inevitably a sense of incompleteness to a show built from music Larson never released in his lifetime. But that incompleteness is also what gives The Jonathan Larson Project its meaning. Rather than remembering an artist only through his finished masterpieces, the show puts the creative process itself on stage. We see the attempts, the discarded ideas, the rewriting and the gradual search for a voice of his own.
The audience itself was striking, noticeably younger and more diverse than the crowds I often encounter in London theatres. Thirty years ago, Rent brought the lives of young people and LGBTQ+ communities unapologetically onto the stage, drawing a new generation into the theatre. A generation later, Larson’s music still seems to be connecting with young audiences.
ⓒDanny Kaan
After the curtain call, the five performers come together to sing ‘Piano’. Its lyrics and melody are simple enough to sing along with almost immediately. “Oh, piano, you saved my soul, amen.” Written by Larson at 23 and left unfinished, the song finally found its way to the stage decades later, carried by the voices of the performers and the audience. That one song alone seems to capture the meaning of the entire project.
The evening ends with a photograph of a young Larson sitting at the piano with a slightly bashful smile. Artists who die young never grow old. He remains frozen in time, as if watching the five performers on stage from behind them. Jonathan Larson, who urged us in Rent to sing together because life goes on, is no longer here. But Rent continues to be performed worldwide. In London, it returns for its 30th anniversary at the Duke of York’s Theatre from August 26. Just as ‘Seasons of Love’, heard at the beginning of the evening, measures a year in 525,600 minutes, Larson’s own life stopped at 35. But his songs continue to be sung.
The Jonathan Larson Project is playing at Southwark Playhouse Borough until August 22.
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