Lin-Manuel Miranda Goes in Search of Lost Time

The musical “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” is, in a word, haunted. When Jonathan Larson wrote it, he was a struggling theatre composer facing down his thirtieth birthday, despondent after years of rejection for his dystopian rock musical, “Superbia.” In the fall of 1990, Larson workshopped a new one-man show, originally titled “Boho Days,” about a frustrated composer named Jonathan who was turning thirty. The next year, it was renamed “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” Larson, accompanied by a band, sat at a piano and griped, in song, about his stalled career and his desperation for a breakout hit. The “Tick, Tick” of the title was the insistent warning in his ears—after all, his idol, Stephen Sondheim, had opened his first Broadway show when he was twenty-seven. “They’re singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ / You just want to lay down and cry,” Larson sang. Soon after, Larson did write a breakthrough musical, but he didn’t live to see its success. He died in 1996, of an aortic aneurysm, hours before the first scheduled Off Broadway performance of “Rent.”

Five years later, the playwright David Auburn adapted “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” into a three-person Off Broadway musical. The show was now a portrait of an artist on the cusp of global success, unaware that the acclaim he longed for would coincide with his death, and the ticking clock took on a prescient new meaning. One of the audience members was a college senior named Lin-Manuel Miranda. Like Larson, he would hustle through the theatre world in his twenties before writing a transformative Broadway hit in his thirties—but, unlike Larson, he lived to see it conquer the world. Miranda has now followed up “Hamilton” with a film version of “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!,” his directorial début, which arrives on Netflix this week. Miranda has expanded what was once a solo show even further, re-creating Larson’s bohemian New York of 1990 and employing a sprawling cast led by Andrew Garfield, as Jonathan. When I spoke to Miranda recently, over Zoom, he was at his home office, in Washington Heights, which looked a lot like Jonathan’s in the film—keyboard by the window, busy bookshelves—with the exception of a few Tony and Grammy Awards. He had just come from a “brief but vigorous game of handball,” and we got to talking about the artistic life, the difficulties of success, and the strange circumstances that created “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!”

We began our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, discussing a scene in which Jonathan, after banging his head against an unwritten song, goes swimming in a public pool and has a musical epiphany mid-lap.

I live two blocks from that pool.

No way! That’s a great place to start.

The pool? Let’s go for it.

So, the first field trip we took was to the Library of Congress [where Larson’s papers are kept], and we found the song “Swimming,” which Jonathan used to perform as part of “Boho Days.” But it was cut for the Off Broadway version, and you can see why. It’s a total stream-of-consciousness song. You realize, Oh, this only makes sense if you’re swimming at that speed. It’s actually more cinematic than it is stageable, and so I was, like, This is going in our movie. Then our location manager was looking at pools for us. I pushed for the one at Hunter College, because that’s the one I swam in during eighth grade. And then there was the one two blocks from you. When we got there, we realized: this was where Jonathan actually swam, because there are lyrics that only make sense at that particular pool: “red stripe, green stripe, forty feet, fifty feet.” That’s the tiling in that pool.

There’s a lyric in that song that really stuck out: “Can I make it to forty?” That seems to sum up the weird black magic of this musical.

Like so much in this show, it is poignant, literal, and figurative. It’s literal, because he’s looking at the ten-foot marks at the bottom of the pool. It’s figurative, because Jonathan’s writing about turning thirty. And it’s poignant, because he never reached forty. He does so much singing about the big deal of this decade that makes any of us over thirty kind of roll our eyes, but he never reached forty. He never reached thirty-six.

Let’s back up. The show is so much about the finite time that artists have to do their work, and you are someone who I imagine, post-“Hamilton,” could do pretty much anything you wanted. Why direct a movie of this relatively obscure Off Broadway musical?

The simplest answer is because the story is very foundational to me. That show had been swimming around in my subconscious for as long as I’ve wanted to do this for a living. I thought my chapter with it was closed when I was lucky enough to play it at City Center, in 2014. I got to play Jonathan, and it is the most surreal production in my mind, because it was just before my life changed with “Hamilton.” It was with my future co-star Leslie Odom, Jr., and my past co-star Karen Olivo. And it’s exactly where I was at.

You mean you were where Jonathan was in his career when he was writing the show?

I mean I was in this limbo. I knew that I was in between one thing and the next, and the show is very much about that. But, to rewind even further, when I first saw the Off Broadway production, it felt like a message in a bottle just for me. I was a senior in college, about to graduate with a degree in theatre studies, and it was the month after September 11th, when everyone was questioning everything. The way I experienced it was, like, “Hey, that pretty girl sitting next to you who’s a talented actress is not going to be your girlfriend anymore, and she’s not going to be an actress. Your other friends who are so brilliant and are studying the arts are all going to grow up and get real jobs. You’re going to be the only idiot smashing your head against their childhood dream. And, if it’s worth it to you, it’s worth it. But it’s really fucking hard.” My girlfriend at the time—apparently I ditched her after the show. I don’t remember this, but I was, like, “I gotta go,” and walked off into the night. I think I had the presence of mind to put her in a cab. But I just was, like, I have to go think about my life. I went back and saw it three times.

What had been your relationship with “Rent”?

I experienced “Rent” in a similar way. I saw it for my seventeenth birthday. It was the first truly contemporary musical I had ever seen. I remember thinking, This takes place now? In New York? Downtown? The fact that Jonathan died young loomed large in my imagination before I even walked into the theatre. I was a very morbid kid. I had a poster of Brandon Lee on my wall. I was really haunted by promise cut short. Always had been. The show felt so personal and homemade, and I didn’t know musicals could feel like that. I grew up in the era of “Phantom” and “Cats,” these extravaganzas, and here are these lyrics about “throw down the keys so I can get into your building”—which was true when we went to 508 Greenwich [Larson’s apartment building] to film. There’s a phone booth across the street you would call Jonathan’s apartment from, and he would throw his key down, because their buzzer was busted.

This musical began as a one-man show, but your movie is pretty large in scope. Can you talk about building out the world using what was already available? It almost seems like you and Steven Levenson, the screenwriter, were collaborating with a ghost.

I think musical films need a strong frame to allow the suspension of disbelief—when the camera’s right up here, it’s hard to buy someone breaking into song. So my conceit was: as soon as his fingers touch the keys, we’re in the world of Jonathan Larson. That can be very real, and that can be as unreliable as we need it to be. That was a liberating concept. In the casting of “Rent,” you saw the most diverse cast you’d ever seen on Broadway. There’s a quote from the book on the making of “Rent,” when Jonathan invited everyone to his apartment for the peasants’ feast. He said, “This is a musical about my friends, and you’re all playing my friends.” I took that as an invitation to cast this as diversely as possible, because when he cast his friends he cast as diversely as possible. Then we talked to folks—never setting out to make “St. Jonathan,” because no one who knew him would argue that he was a saint. He was a tough collaborator. He could really get in his own way when he felt like he was right.