Review: THE JONATHAN LARSON PROJECT, Southwark Playhouse
This song cycle, featuring the Rent composer’s back catalogue, transfers to London from New York
With Rent set to return to the West End in September, now feels like the right time for The Jonathan Larson Project, a retrospective of what the composer Jonathan Larson did before he wrote the classic East Village-set tale of life and love amid the AIDs crisis.
When Larson died of a heart condition aged 35 on the eve of Rent’s premiere, he left behind a wealth of standalone songs, as well as full musicals that never made it past the workshop stage, many of which have never been performed live until now. And there is more than a hint of Rent in John Simpkins’ direction and Nate Bertone’s production design for this song cycle, which premiered in New York last year.
We’re in an NYC loft, with a piano gathering dust in the centre, and the production has something of Rent's rough-and-ready, bohemian earnestness. There’s a charmingly makeshift projector showing Larson home movies, and the cast are constantly moving props on and off stage, giving a sense of the creative process underway. Even our five performers seem to be ghosts of the Rent cast – Max Harwood and Michael Mather pine and yearn and dream of the future in the manner of Mark and Roger, and Imelda Warren Green’s sultry, slightly silly cabaret number early on recalls Maureen.
But the real appeal of this as a standalone production is in the songs, most of which missed out on success in Larson’s lifetime because of timing rather than quality. This show is evidence of Larson’s versatility as a composer – there are rock-infused musical theatre songs about making it in New York, but also radio-friendly summery pop tracks, environmental protest songs and high-concept futuristic satire.
There are songs that would have felt radical when they were written – praising casual sex as “a cure for everyone here” at the height of AIDs paranoia – and songs that are alarmingly prescient (Larson’s futuristic Republican candidate is sponsored by Trump Industries). It’s all carried by a charismatic cast of five who delight in rabble-rousing the audience before the show, led by musical theatre veteran and former X Factor runner-up Marcus Collins.
But the quality of the material makes the audience long for more from the overall concept, dreamed up by Jennifer Ashley Tepper. Without any narrative to tie these disparate songs together, Larson’s gift for crafting character through song gets lost in the weeds. In its bid to evoke a sense of Larson’s creative process, the production can’t seem to decide between stripped-back jam sessions and fully choreographed set pieces, and settles on a jarring split between the two.
Via the set and costumes, we have a universe conjured up for us, of five young people creating and protesting in New York, that then isn’t followed through. Early on, ‘One of These Days’, the ‘I Want’ song from Larson’s rejected dystopian musical Superbia, hints at each of the five’s individual ambitions, and we spend the rest of the show wanting to learn more about them, only to be unsatisfied.
The Jonathan Larson Project is thus hard to categorise. It is not a full musical cobbling together unreleased songs (as happened to so many Golden Age composers), nor is it a revue in the manner of Stephen Sondheim’s Putting it Together or Side by Side, where well-loved songs gain new lives outside their original context. It’s nonetheless a great deep dive into what made the young Larson tick, for diehard fans or as an introduction to his work, but these songs deserve a bit of narrative structure.
The Jonathan Larson Project plays at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 22 August
Photo credits: Danny Kaan
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