How do you measure a year? Love is one answer, according to Jonathan Larson’s Rent, but what about songs? This tribute, which ran off-Broadway last year, reveals the industriousness of the composer and lyricist, who died aged 35 in 1996. But it also highlights the calibre of his wealth of lesser-known material, written for obscure cabarets, cut from his musicals or otherwise unused, these spare parts stored in a Library of Congress archive. A selection of 18 songs make up a pleasingly eclectic revue conceived by Jennifer Ashley Tepper.
Take the opener, Greene Street, written as a 23-year-old newcomer to New York. With propulsive piano, it’s a huge crush of a song, in awe of the city while the sun bursts through on a snowy day. Larson puts a positively bucolic spin on this SoHo address (whose name “don’t mean money, honey!”) as the new arrival, also green by nature, receives a wink from a stranger amid the urban anonymity. There’s the hint of a jingle or theme tune but it’s irresistible, blissfully shared by the cast of five.
That song later gets a flipside with Rhapsody, a jaded tour of the rat-infested city where it turns out “life’s not free”. We’re in Rent territory and throughout these lyrics, artistic aspirations butt against harsh realities – as considered by Larson himself in an introductory archive recording.
Finding cohesion in songs from different projects is challenging without imposing a theme or storyline as in Marry Me a Little, the relationship revue with pick’n’mix Sondheim. John Simpkins’ production has a set design by Nate Bertone that suggests we’ve crammed into a Manhattan apartment where pals share drinks and stories around the piano, a whisky bottle poured and doubling as percussion. A stepladder stands in for a fire escape and a sheet is used for projections alongside Livi van Warmelo’s band.
The ramshackle charm of the setup eases the more extreme musical leaps, such as from the tipsily rhyming, fatalistic blues of Break Out the Booze (set at the end of prohibition) to breathy pop banger Out of My Dreams (which could have escaped from a glossy 80s romance movie), with Imelda Warren-Green and Natalie Kassanga respectively owning each solo’s range. Warren-Green reaches dizzy hilarity, armed with a power hose to clean the furniture, in a fever-dream homemaking sketch inspired by the 1939 World’s Fair, given a spray lighting effect by Sam Biondolillo.
The songs are reordered from the 2019 album of the project, with the perspective of the queasy Valentine’s Day powerfully shifted from third to first person, with Michael Mather bringing intense physicality to its abuse narrative. Max Harwood is bracingly vulnerable on Falling Apart while Marcus Collins masters the storytelling of the ghostly Iron Mike, about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. A couple of songs don’t command attention and there is an over-long, weak satire of a stump speech but The Truth Is a Lie’s miscellany of misinformation from 1990 – both goofy and chilling – is distinctly Trumpian in an evening that mostly reflects on Reagan’s 1980s (with a diversion to Orwell’s on the stirring SOS).
When the world is falling apart, playing the piano can “save my soul”, writes a 23-year-old Larson. Not only does he get away with such a sentiment but there’s an equivalent effect from hearing the night’s best songs. A revelation.
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