#TICK TOCK BOOM PROFESSIONAL#

Stephen Sondheim (Bradley Whitford), Jon’s musical theater idol and occasional creative mentor, originally pointed out the problem to him after an earlier workshop reading of the piece, but the young writer hasn’t yet been able to draft anything suitable. With the workshop performance of Superbia only a few days away, Jon faces a creative crisis writing a song for performer Karessa ( Vanessa Hudgens) to fill a hole in the second act. Susan, meanwhile, is considering shifting away from modern dance performance and accepting a teaching job that would take her away from New York, a source of conflict with Jon that prompts a painful examination of their relationship in the downbeat “Therapy.” Michael has already quit his unsuccessful acting career for a lucrative job in advertising and rented a fancy new apartment, the setting for “No More,” an amusing duet between Jon and Michael celebrating the consumer comforts of an upscale lifestyle. Most of the first act focuses on Jon’s preparation for a workshop staging of Superbia and his sense of time slipping away as his friends begin to move on from the theater world. The filmmakers use a staged performance of Tick, Tick … Boom!, with Jon leading a small electric band in a selection of songs, to frame the central narrative, consisting of dramatic scenes as well as more elaborate production numbers featuring Jon’s girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), his gay roommate and childhood friend Michael (Robin De Jesús), and the supporting cast.Īlthough it’s initially a rather unwieldy structure, once the film hits its stride the alternating onstage and on-set scenes provide a palpable sense of variation and energetic pacing.

#TICK TOCK BOOM PROFESSIONAL#

This familiar setup introduces the production’s first song, “30/90,” which finds Jon stressing out over his upcoming 30th birthday and lamenting his lack of creative and professional achievement. In his frequently self-referential style, Larson created the character of Jon ( Andrew Garfield) as the protagonist of Tick, Tick … Boom! A struggling playwright who waits tables at the diner, he’s trying to complete Superbia, the futuristic dystopian musical he’s been working on for the past eight years (which was also Larson’s first original musical theater piece). When Larson was writing and developing Tick, Tick … Boom!, he was just another broke New York theater composer, working a day job at the downtown Moondance Diner, a key setting in Miranda and Dear Evan Hansen screenwriter Steven Levenson’s dynamic reimagining of Larson’s work. It’s not an entirely convincing tactic, although hard-core musical theater fans are likely to find it fairly irresistible. Despite the resonance of Larson’s source material, particularly evident throughout Rent, Miranda’s approach to Tick, Tick … Boom! lacks a similar sense of immediacy, as if he’s regarding the musical through a haze of nostalgia, seeking to persuade viewers to fall under the creative spell that clearly still lingers for him. As he was first coming to prominence with his Broadway production of In the Heights, Miranda played the lead in a New York staging of Tick, Tick … Boom!, laying the groundwork for the current film adaptation, his feature directorial debut.Ĭast: Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Vanessa Hudgens, Robin de Jesús, Joshua Henry, Bradley Whitford, Tariq Trotter, Judith Light, Michaela Jaé (Mj) RodriguezĪfter the overwhelming success of Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winner Hamilton and his collaborations on animated family movies, Miranda emerged as something of an heir apparent to Larson, with a similar ability to capture the specific tenor of the national mood and distill it into an individual song or an entire creative work. Known worldwide as a production that changed the trajectory of contemporary musical theater, Jonathan Larson’s Rent profoundly influenced a generation of theater artists, including a young Lin-Manuel Miranda, who first saw the show in the late ’90s.īefore Rent, though, there was Larson’s semi-autobiographical Tick, Tick … Boom!, a smaller-scale, 1990-set rock musical about a New York playwright struggling to find his voice as the days and minutes tick down to his 30th birthday.

Tick tock boom