While it was posthumously adapted by playwright David Auburn into a three-actor production that premiered off-Broadway in 2001, the show was first performed by Larson in 1990 as a one-man-with-a-band rock monologue. Originally called Boho Days, it was rich with influences ranging from Billy Joel and Elton John to Talking Heads and The Cure. After that initial staging, he made some changes and presented it again with the new title in 1992, all the while working on Rent, seeds of which are audibly discernible in Tick, Tick…Boom!
In his staging, Auburn also excised lines such as “sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to explode,” because, as Garfield explained to the New York Times in September, “It was too on-the-nose for people after he passed away.”
But whether Larson had an uncanny premonition about his own fate or not, he didn’t distinguish between the urgency to live a good life spread out over many decades or within only a few.
“He knew that this is a short ride and a sacred one,” Garfield said, “and he had a lot of keys and secrets to how to live with ourselves and with each other and how to make meaning out of being here. Once he accepted that, he could be fully a part of the world, and then he could write Rent. I don’t think there’s an accident in that.”
But with Rent and its 11-year Broadway run tending to dominate the Larson narrative, most people may not even know that he had Tick, Tick…Boom! in his pocket, as well.
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