Theatre review: The Jonathan Larson Project

Jennifer Ashley Tepper's collection of lesser-known songs by Rent and tick, tick... BOOM! creator Jonathan Larson opens with a video medley of his best-known one, "Seasons of Love," being sung by different groups in different languages, and laments the fact that Larson never lived to see the effect his music had on people and musical theatre as a whole. Although as ever I have to wonder if there would have been anything like that much influence if he hadn't died young - his sudden death aged 35 the day before its first performance is so tied into the legend surrounding Rent and so perfectly fitting to its story that you have to wonder if it might have become a well-liked but obscure show without that unwanted publicity push, rather than a global phenomenon. Does The Jonathan Larson Project go any way to answer how much his success owes to the fact that it's posthumous?

Well it certainly suggests that we missed out on a lot of much better work that he might have produced later in life: If the gap in quality between these early songs and the more famous ones is anything to go by, Larson's songwriting was improving massively in his thirties.

But these largely date from the 1980s when he was in his twenties, and while a couple have decent tunes, almost all of them are let down by the lyrics. I think the earnest sentimentality is one of the reasons Rent took a lot longer to gain traction in the UK than in the US, and there's far too many instances where it seems like a teenager's angsty poetry about how nobody understands him has been set to music. He also seems to have contributed to a lot of one-off topical cabaret shows, and the examples we get here suggest why he's not particularly remembered for comedy.

Although being able to hear the comedy lyrics properly might have helped: The five-strong cast of Max Harwood, Imelda Warren-Green, Natalie Kassanga, Marcus Collins and understudy Edward Flynn Haddon seemed to be constantly adjusting their mics and earpieces in the face of a dodgy sound mix, and mics only four out of five of which worked at any given time, with no apparent choice of which four it would be. Meanwhile the show's original off-Broadway director John Simpkins leans right into the over-earnestness.

For all that there are songs that stand out for the right reasons: Clumsy lyrics about the Exxon Valdez oil spill aside, "Iron Mike," sung by Collins, is a decent musical theatre tune; "Love Heals," sung by Kassanga, was written about a friend of Larson's who died of AIDS, and the genuine emotion makes it stand head and shoulders above some of the more mawkish efforts. The highlight is "Valentine's Day," sung by Haddon, and its mix of catchy music and dark, violent lyrics shows why it was a personal favourite of Larson's that he tried and failed to squeeze into a number of projects, including Rent itself. But for the most part, when the show repeatedly reminds us that some of these songs were never publicly performed in his lifetime, I got the sense that Larson knew what he was doing when he kept them that way.

The Jonathan Larson Project by Jonathan Larson and Jennifer Ashley Tepper is booking until the 22nd of August at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Danny Kaan.