Compelling Tale of Artistic Anxiety In Jonathan Larson’s Pre-Rent ‘tick, tick… BOOM!’

By Bill Hirschman

There is little thematically new about an artist struggling at a crucial moment whether to abandon their precious pursuit of a unique vision or to compromise with a surrendering retreat to the practical “realities” of “the real world.”

But Jonathan Larson’s semi-autobiographical pre-Rent musical tick, tick…BOOM! compellingly injects us deep into the agonized guts of a young man teetering on the Great Divide of such a decision – someone we root for as he struggles with discouraging anxiety made nearly corporeal.

Actors’ Playhouse’s energetic production captures its audience not just with Larson’s then-still evolving score but with three full-throated performances helmed by a skilled director – all of them with Miami roots.

From our hero’s first steamrolling opening musical monologue, Jon invites us into his inner anguish in the week before his 30^th birthday – which will occur one day after his musical Superbia is slated to bow in a workshop production after a five-year evolution.

At the same time, his lovely girlfriend, dancer Susan, is pushing for him to abandon his as-yet unfruitful career and move to Connecticut with her.

Even tougher, his closest childhood friend and roommate, Michael, is moving out to a high-rise condo now that he has left the arts for a job in an advertising agency. Michael has offered Jon a more reliable but artistically stale job in the firm in market research. After all, Michael points out, he has a BMW and the ability to buy three fashion belts at the same time.

It would force Jon to surrender his seemingly stalled dream of producing an artistically successful musical – preferably on Broadway but not limited to it. As this birthday approaches, the choice is forcing him into a decision. Tick,tick…BOOM is the clock we can hear audibly sounding in his head.

Jon worships the work of Stephen Sondheim (as does this critic) and one of the more ingenious numbers occurs when he and Michael sing a number about Jon’s day job in a diner, entitled “Sunday,” brilliantly echoing Sondheim’s song from Sunday in the Park With George copying chords, rhythms and outright lines.

A snippet:

All: Forever in the blue silver chromium diner

Jon: Drips the green, orange, violet drool

All: From the fools

Jon: Who’d pay less at home, drinking coffee

All: Light and dark

Jon: And cholesterol. And bums, bums, bums, bums, bums, bums, bums, bums, bums.

He speaks and sings directly to the audience throughout, pouring out the diverse ideas spinning in his brain like a nuclear cyclotron.

“If there’s enough buzz, the show might be produced and if the show is produced it might be a hit — and if it is I won’t have to take the marketing job and I can buy the BMW anyway and I will have done it all before I’m thirty, or at least I can fudge the dates to make it sound that way in my Sunday Times Arts & Leisure profile.
I am not proud of this line of thinking. But it’s not my fault! It’s hard for people born after 1960 to be idealistic or original. We know what happens to ideals. They’re assassinated or corrupted or co-opted. It’s 1990 for God’s sake! It is not an exciting period. It is not a period of ferment. It’s fucking stodgy is what it is — conservative, complacent, obtuse and unimaginative. Or, to put it another way: George Bush is president of the United States.”

Suddenly, in a tragic-it-is-to-say-surprising development for those of us in 2024, the inevitable death sentence of AIDS interrupts without needing to be spelled out at first.

The time frame is nailed down throughout in 1990 including scores of time-specific references such as wryly inserting in one of his lyrics a snatch from the sit-com The Jeffersons’ theme song “Movin’ on up to the east side.”

But for older audiences who lived through that period, a certain reverberation echoes their own experiences in this show first seen in 2001. And for younger audiences, we’re guessing Jon’s life resonates like a 2024 Notre Dame belltower.

Indeed, at one low point in his trek, Jon says, “The theater, the music…. I think I’ve given it an honest try, with all the talent and effort I’ve got. And it hasn’t worked. I’m not sorry I tried. I’m proud of it, but now it’s time to take hard look at my situation and not be egotistical, not delude myself, just admit it’s time to move on. I’ve been stuck. Everyone else, you (Michael) and Susan, have kept moving. I’m the only one still here banging my head against the wall….. I’m going to stop for awhile. The thing is, I can always come back to it, if I want, when I’m older, when I’m smarter, when I’ve figured out a little more clearly what it is I want to do.”

A decision is unavoidable as the clock inches toward his workshop and his birthday.

Silently superimposed with no mention until the finale, those who know of Larson’s life cannot watch Jon’s fictional journey without knowing that its real-life model died of an aortic collapse on the eve of Rent’s opening night in 1996.  tick,tick…BOOM, indeed.

(Note: Those details are projected on the back of Jon’s piano at the finale but are almost impossible to decipher for most of the audience.)

Adam Kantor’s Jon instantly captures the audience with a winning personality and an elastic slender body that only stops when he is in deep contemplation. And he never seems at rest over the crisis he is facing. Kantor has a grandmother in Miami that he still visits and declares his second home. He has worked in New York, winning awards, and was in the The Band’s Visit On Broadway production that earned an Emmy and Grammy.

María Bilbao as his lover Susan is so recognizable as someone who loves Jon but who cannot continue to live this tentative life. The Miami native also works around the country including as Johanna in a revival of Sweeney Todd starring Josh Groban.

Nate Promkul

Special mention is due to the company’s Michael, Nate Promkul, one of the region’s fastest up and coming actors who won a Silver Palm recently and has three Carbonell nominations. He can be alternately full out funny or deeply thoughtful within seconds, and he has a powerful voice obvious in the solo “Real Life.” Anytime you see he is in a cast, it’s worth buying a ticket.

Note that Bilbao and Promkul also deftly and nimbly take on a dozen chameleonic supporting characters from Jon’s agent to his father.

These are exhausting roles for all and Zach Spound is listed as the male fill in and associate music director.

And of course, last but not least is the director, Andy Señor Jr., a 50-year-old Miami native whose Broadway and off-Broadway career has blossomed over past decades. He played Angel in Rent’s Broadway production and its staging in London. He worked with the original director Michael Grief when it was restaged in Japan and Korea. He worked on producing a documentary about producing Rent in Havana. And he directed a production of tick ,tick…BOOM! in Japan. He also was director of the tour of On Your Feet and assistant director on the Broadway edition.

His work here is notable for making these characters seem like real people you recognize – who just happen to break into hurricane-level song and dance. He imbues the entire evening with verve and imagination. His staging, along with choreographer Karla Puno Garcia, keeps the journey swirling.

Music director David Nagy leads his fine band of Julie Jacos, Greg Minnick and Jeff Carswell and Ranses Colon. But he is one of the parties weaving these three superb voices in and out and through each other.

Jon’s Soho apartment was designed here by Frank J. Oliva as a rising collection of bookcases and shelves jammed with a menagerie of household goods, instruments, clothes, books, foodstuff accumulated by Jodi Dellaventura, lit by Eric Nelson.

Larson wrote the first edition of tick, tick…BOOM! in 1991 as a solo autobiographical piece that he performed in Greenwich Village and off-Broadway. After his death in 1996, David Auburn (shamefully listed here solely as script consultant) reworked it into a full musical with three actors and new arrangements and orchestrations by Stephen Oremus.  That premiered off-Broadway in 2001 staring Raul Esparza.  A significantly reworked and expanded film version appeared on Netflix in 2021.

tick, tick…BOOM! runs through Dec. 8 at Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables. Wednesdays 2 p.m., Sundays 3 p.m., Wednesdays-Saturday 8 p.m. Post Show Q&A with the Friday, November 22. Runs 95 minutes with no intermission. Call 305-444-9293, or visit actorsplayhouse.org.