Susan Granger’s review of “tick, tick…BOOM!” (Westport Country Playhouse)
When the late Jonathan Larson turned 30 in 1990, he wrote a semi-autobiographical “rock monologue” originally known as “30/90,” a title derived from his age and the year. That became “tick, tick…BOOM!” which played briefly in showcase productions. Larson’s subsequent claim to fame was “Rent,” which won a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awards. After his death in 1996 from a ruptured aortic aneurysm on the night “Rent” was to open, admiring collaborators collated Larson’s original sketches and fragments and director Stephen Shaw expanded the solo concept into a three-person musical.
The story is a familiar, albeit tedious one: an undiscovered, unappreciated, insecure composer/lyricist, Jon (Colin Hanlon) is struggling for recognition in the musical theater in Manhattan. Resisting his best friend’s (Wilson Cruz) offer of a high-paying marketing job and his dancer girl-friend’s (Pearl Sun) plea to move to Massachusetts (either Cape Cod or Northampton), settle down and raise a family, he persists in pursuing his dream which, in this case, is a workshop production of an opus titled “Superbia.”
While Colin Hanlon succeeds in radiating intense angst, the music he wails is a repetitive, unremarkable mix of pop and rock – with various parodies of previous hit musicals, like Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” Playing a variety of superficially defined roles, Pearl Sun and Wilson Cruz demonstrate their versatility and Scott Schwartz deserves credit for his inventive direction with a band perched behind and above the proceedings on David Farley’s two-tiered set. Finally, a comparison, both in themes (sacrifice for art/consumerism vs. creativity) and in music, between this minor effort with the far-better “Rent” is inevitable and, not surprisingly, in their program bios, both Hanlon and Cruz have appeared in various productions of “Rent” – with Hanlon’s testifying that he’s played every white guy in the show over the years.
“Tick, Tick…Boom!” is at the Westport Country Playhouse through July 18.