Chu’s visual treatment of Miranda’s In the Heights earlier this year. Throughout, Miranda’s direction is clear, lively, and clever, as his crystalline writing elsewhere might portend, and his witty, wise work timing the cinematography to the score often recalls the musical precision in Jon M. With a nod to Cabaret, Miranda frames several of the songs as diegetic performances that cut back and forth between Jonathan’s concert performance of tick, tick… BOOM! (with some thrilling backup vocals from Vanessa Hudgens and Joshua Henry, who also appear as actor friends throughout) and the scenes to which the songs respond. As they embrace after a ferocious argument, Susan catches Jonathan gingerly trying out a melody, using her back as a keyboard, already turning his feelings about their conflict into a new song. The film leans first and foremost into what it means to be a single-minded writer: Jonathan can barely sleep until he’s found the right words and melodies, and he struggles to stay fully connected to the real world while his imagination competes for his attention. After Larson’s death, playwright David Auburn developed the piece into a popular three-person musical, focusing on the characters that Larson had fictionalized in his self-portrait: his long-suffering dancer girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), and his best friend, Michael (Robin de Jesús), who’s just abandoned acting for the security of the corporate world. Far from just a tribute piece, though, tick, tick… BOOM! also explicitly asserts that the story is being told as Larson intended, through his own work, with his own voice, on his own terms.ĭear Evan Hansen’s Steven Levenson’s restless screenplay adapts a musical monologue that Larson wrote and performed about the failure of Superbia, his rock adaptation of Orwell’s 1984. With its invitation list extended to so many theatrical legends-some of whom Larson idolized himself and some of whom, Miranda included, owe their success in part to his mainstreaming of contemporary rock musical theater-Miranda’s film positions Larson as both a vital descendant and ancestor, a singular figure in a singular art form.
#TICKTICK BOOM SERIES#
Throughout the film, the creator of Hamilton and In the Heights delivers a cornucopia of surprises for musical theater fans-not so much a series of Easter Eggs as an omelet buffet-including a cavalcade of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos from acclaimed theater writers and performers showing up to honor Larson. With his feature-length directorial debut, tick, tick… BOOM!, Lin-Manuel Miranda never quite resolves the tension between well-attended wake and intimate memoir in paying tribute to the late Jonathan Larson (Andrew Garfield), writer and composer of the rock musical Rent.
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