“I am the conceiver of The Jonathan Larson Project,” says Broadway producer Jennifer Ashley Tepper, slightly in the manner of an addict confessing to an addiction.
Jennifer Ashley Tepper outside the Broadway theatre staging The Jonathan Larson Project[Missing Credit]
The Jonathan Larson Project cast (Photo: Danny Kaan)[Missing Credit]
Tepper’s obsession with Larson’s work can be traced back to the 40-year-old’s batmitzvah in Boca Raton, Florida where she was raised. The sign-in board depicted her dressed as Rent’s tragic heroine Mimi jumping out of a pile of Rent playbills. Fifteen years later Tepper was part of the programming team at New York City Centre. The performing arts venue was hosting a production of Tick, Tick… Boom! with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda playing the role of Larson.
“My God. I must have been 28,” says Tepper, when we meet online before she left New York for London. Besides Miranda, who would go on to direct the Netflix movie for which Tepper was a consultant? Larson’s work has a habit of attracting some of musical theatre’s outrageous talents, including Sam Pinkleton (who won a Tony for directing Oh Mary!) and Shaina Taub, the double Tony-winning writer (for her suffragette musical Suffs) and lyricist (to Elton John’s music) for the musical adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, currently at the Dominion.
“It was such a crazy group of artists who were obsessed with Tick, Tick… Boom!,” remembers Tepper. When the run finished she hit upon the idea of putting on a “miniature lobby concert to celebrate Jonathan Larson.
“I really wanted to expose some of his lesser-known songs,” she says. Although at the time she didn’t know how many lesser-known songs existed. The resulting show was like five songs performed on a rickety, makeshift stage with a keyboard. But that started a relationship with the Larson family; his parents Allan and Nanette, who died in 2022 and 2018 respectively, and his sister, Julie.
By the time Tepper had become the programming director of the cabaret venue 54 Below, the idea of a fully staged show had taken hold. To get more material she would have to do some digging. The Larson family had deposited all Jonathan’s recordings and material at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. So to sift through the archive Tepper made the train journey from New York several times.
“His family had boxed up all of his things and so I had no idea of the volume and breadth of material that existed there. There were a lot of mysteries to be solved. I’d pick up a cassette tape that said ‘Jonathan Larson. Ideas, 1987’ and be like ‘What’s this song? What’s that song?’. There were scripts, notebooks, journals, lyric pages… And there were so many unfinished musicals. Often I would listen to a tape and it would be Jonathan singing with his keyboard in his bedroom and there would be no real way of knowing if it was a song he wrote at 25 or it if it was him covering something obscure he heard on the radio.”
One day at the library Tepper fished a list out of one of the boxes. It contained all the songs he had written. It was a sort of guide without which Tepper “wouldn’t have solved a lot of the mysteries”.
After the material for the show had been identified, Tepper, the show’s director, John Simpkins, and others connected to the production visited the apartment where Larson had lived as a struggling artist – and died at the age of 35 on the cusp of stardom.
“He didn’t get to see success in his lifetime,” says Tepper. “But seeing how he kept every rejection letter he ever received, including rejections from theatres that you know would be thrilled to have any Jonathan Larson song on their stage now… it was so viscerally affecting.”
What surprised Tepper was how songs that were apparently never written for the same show spoke to connecting themes. Many of the compositions also have lyrics that at the time must have seemed marginal or downright eccentric, but which are eerily relevant to the world today.
The song Likability/La Di Da is an example of Larson’s political sensibility. Written in 1989 it has the line Make America great. Another song, Truth Is A Lie, is about “fake news and the political machine” as Tepper puts it. She discovered it in the library a week after Trump was elected.
“I was, like, a block away from the Capitol Building and it was as if Jonathan Larson was speaking to me.”
Another, White Male World, speaks for itself. “The songs would just pop out,” says Tepper.
“The moment I heard Greene Street, I was like, ‘This is the opening number’. It’s about people in New York and what they’re discovering and their connections with each other and the city.
“None of these characters are Jonathan but each of them has traits that belong to him or represent things that he cared about. One character sings Hosing the Furniture, which is about the struggles of being a housewife stuck in the home doing that kind of work. And then later that character gets to sing White Male World which is like a protest song.”
A recurring theme is of people struggling, just as Larson did. And for Tepper, there is something particularly Jewish about Larson’s. “I think he showed an inherently Jewish trait: we’re going to keep going, we’re going to survive. I’ve definitely thought about Jonathan’s Jewishness in reference to his writing.”
Mark Cohen, the documentary maker and narrator in Rent is “canonically Jewish” and talks about learning to tango with the rabbi’s daughter. “There are references everywhere,” says Tepper.
Meanwhile, in this 30th anniversary year of Rent’s birth and Larson’s death the musical returns to the West End in September with Stranger Things actor Gaten Matarazzo playing Cohen.
There is, however, still much Larson material that has not found a stage, says Tepper. Often she would come across an “amazing Jonathan Larson song” that nobody knew but which just didn’t belong in The Jonathan Larson Project.
“I hope all of them have their full day in the sun someday,” she says.
The Jonathan Larson Project is at Southwark Playhouse Borough from July 9 to August 22
jonathanlarson.co.uk
