Rent is one of the best-known and acclaimed Broadway musicals of the past three decades. This free adaptation of Bohemian by Puccini, featuring a group of artists struggling in New York in the AIDS years, is signed Jonathan Larson. Rent received the Pulitzer Prize for Theatrical Work, as well as three equally prestigious Tony Awards – including Best Musical – and a slew of other critical accolades. But Jonathan Larson did not experience the euphoria of this triumph. He died on January 25, 1996, on the eve of the first performance at the New York Theater Workshop, of an aortic aneurysm. He was 35 years old.
Its name does not necessarily mean much to the French public. The film Tick, Tick… Boom!, posted on Netflix on Friday, is the best opportunity to remedy this misunderstanding. This feature film is an adaptation of the autobiographical monologue of the same title in which Jonathan Larson recounted his romantic setbacks and his professional setbacks, in particular the thwarted fate of his creation. Superbia.
A film about “the life force” that was Jonathan Larson
Director Lin Manuel Miranda recalls seeing a performance of Tick, Tick… Boom! while he was in his final year. He told the AV Club website that he thought, “This is what your twenties are going to look like if you really want to do this. »That, that is to say, dramatic art and musical. Let’s open a parenthesis to say that, in this area, Lin-Manuel Miranda excelled: undeniable Broadway star, we owe him in particular the musical Hamilton, already a classic of the genre. Let’s close the parenthesis.
“Jonathan Larson did not live long enough to see the mark his work left in the world, it’s so tragic”, continues the filmmaker in his interview with the AV Club. But he insists, the subject of the film “is not his death, but his life, the life force that he was for those close to him”.
Yes Tick, Tick… Boom! evokes from the first minutes the precocious death of the artist, he quickly turns away from tears to highlight his fantasy, his humor and his obsession for creation – which has played him more than one trick on the relational level. The inventive staging but not flashy, twirling but not dizzying, underlines the point, and accompanies with relevance each of the sung sequences.
A “mysterious connection”
In the main role, Andrew Garfield impresses. Lin-Miranda chose him after he saw him, in 2018, in a performance ofAngels in America on Broadway. “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I felt he could do anything. So I chose it in my head probably a year before I told him about it, ”the director told New York Times.
It turns out Andrew Garfield is quite capable of singing (and dancing). Still in the columns of the American daily, the actor confides: “It’s strange when there is someone like Jon[athan] you had no relationship with before and suddenly there is this mysterious connection that I will never let go. I’m so happy Jon was revealed to me because now I can’t remember who I was until I knew who Jon was. Audiences who discover Larson in the Netflix film may not experience such a near-mystical crisis, but chances are they won’t be forgetting this artist anytime soon.