Stage-to-screen review: tick, tick... BOOM!

Touch wood and everything, but I seem to be back at a point where a completely theatre-free week is a bit of a rarity for me, but I did know that a couple, like this one, were coming up. So I made sure to hang on to a few of the radio or screen adaptations of stage works that I used to keep myself and this blog going during lockdown, including the Lin-Manuel Miranda-directed adaptation of tick, tick... BOOM! This also ended up being the week Andrew Garfield got an Oscar nomination for the film, so it's turned out to be fairly apt timing as well. I seem to be regularly drawn back to Rent despite my very mixed feelings about it, but Jonathan Larson's punctuation heavy* earlier musical is one I'd only seen once in a fringe production which left me distinctly underwhelmed. But Miranda does have the advantage of a new screenplay by Dear Evan Hansen's Steven Levenson to help make sense of the story.

He also, of course, has the advantage of a Netflix budget and, instead of a one-man or three-person fringe show, a full cast including no end of Broadway legends, performers and creators alike, willing to appear in cameo roles to honour Larson's memory.

Because of course Larson's sudden death aged 35, the night before Rent's first public performance, is the stuff of legend, and for better or worse has surely been an element in the composer's posthumous success. It's certainly something that infuses this take on his autobiographical previous work, with reminders at the beginning and end of the film of Larson's most famous work, and how he never got to see it. But if anything, instead of hagiography tick, tick... BOOM! owes more to the Asshole Genius trope Americans are so fond of (and which regular readers will both know I largely blame on Hemingway.) Because Garfield's Jonathan has been working on a futuristic satirical musical for eight years, and has let everything else in his life take second place.

The countdown of the title refers both to the first public showcase of his "Superbia," and especially to his upcoming 30th birthday, which he's decided is the cut-off point by which he needs something to show for his efforts or they'll be worthless. He quits his job at a diner, where his co-workers Carolyn and Freddy (MJ Rodriguez and Ben Levi Ross) seem to be the inspiration for characters and storylines in Rent, while his relationship with Susan (Alexandra Shipp) falters, as he fails to notice how obviously he's putting his work ahead of her.

In many ways I responded to tick, tick... BOOM! in the same way as I do to Rent: I think Larson's a very strong songwriter - "30/90," "Come to Your Senses" and the Sondheim pastiche "Sunday" are all great showstoppers - which is what keeps me coming back, but find the painfully earnest stories and characters hard to swallow. And even more here where he's a character in his own story, Jonathan's bohemianism is desperately pretentious: Surrounded by other writers, artists and performers, he lives in a kind of glamorous squalor and has an all-or-nothing attitude to how to use his talents to support himself. He writes advertising jingles for his own amusement, but when best friend Michael (Robin de Jesús) suggests he sells some to his advertising agency he sees this as a sell-out (despite advertising copy and jingles being how a lot of successful writers and musicians have kicked their careers off for decades✝.)

Still, at least Jonathan-the-writer is aware of Jonathan-the-character's self-centredness, and some of his character development towards the end involves him weighing out his priorities against both his failing relationship, and the fact that Freddy and Michael have both been living with HIV while he moans to them about his musical. You can tell the fondness Miranda has for Larson, whose success paved the way for more varied music like his own to make it to Broadway, and it's an interesting directorial debut - I thought at first the musical numbers were going to be restricted to the scenes of Jonathan performing his showcase, but they do expand into a more colourful and camp sensibility (all those cameos helping to sell the archness.) tick, tick... BOOM!  was worth spending an evening on, as there's strong performances and visuals, but my general irritation at a lot of the themes and central character meant I was never going to love it.

tick, tick... BOOM! by Jonathan Larson and Steven Levenson is streaming internationally on Netflix.

Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.

Photo credit: Macall Polay / Netflix

*a comma, an ellipsis and an exclamation mark in the title? Did Twang!! teach us nothing?

✝two of my biggest bugbears are martyr complexes, and people acting as if a very, very common course of action is beneath them. So Jonathan continuing to slog for hours at a diner, rather than sell some ten-second compositions that could give him the time and money to keep working on his musical, irritates me on multiple levels