Review: tick... tick... BOOM

Movie Night was last night (Kate and I have decided that, with Saturdays mostly at-home for now, that's a good use of them), so we decided to watch tick... tick... BOOM on Netflix.

tl;dr -- beautiful, fun, slightly melancholy musical about artistry vs. capitalism, and striving to make your mark while you still can. Well worth watching.

tick... tick... BOOM was written by Jonathan Larson, better known as the author of Rent, who died many years ago. This production comes via Lin-Manuel Miranda -- I gather that Rent was one of his inspirations to get into musical-writing, so this is sort of his tribute to Larson. The story is very explicitly autobiographical -- as it says at the beginning, it is all true, except for the parts that Jonathan made up.

The story is set the week before Jonathan's 30th birthday -- the first song (and the original title of the show) is "30/90", and his age is looming large. He has a bad case of, "I'm about to turn 30, and I haven't accomplished anything yet".

He's an aspiring musical writer, who has devoted essentially his entire adult life so far to writing Superbia, a science-fiction musical about a dystopian future in which people spend all their time glued to their screens watching shows about celebrities. He finally has a commitment to workshopping the show, and is scrambling to line up all of the moving parts involved in that. He's committing to this completely, quitting his job in order to pursue his dreams -- whether that is a really dumb thing to do is laced through the story.

At the same time, there is a major stumbling block: there is a missing song. He's known this for years, he knows where it belongs in the story, but he has the world's worst case of writer's block around it. As the workshop draws closer, day by day, the stress of that block isn't making his life any easier. And none of this is helped by the fact that his girlfriend is thinking of moving away from NYC, and would like him to come with her.

tick... tick... BOOM is the story of that frustrating week and how it played out. It was originally performed (a couple of years after the events depicted) as almost a one-man show, just Jonathan on a piano plus a band. Lin-Manuel turns it into a full-scale production, with that original stage show as a framing sequence set around the main story fully filmed. As such, it winds up as a show that could never be performed on stage, cutting from the stage to the biography and back again sometimes second-by-second, but it works wonderfully to show Jonathan telling his own story.

The story itself shares a lot of DNA with Rent, and many of the same themes. It is all about the tension of trying to succeed as an artist in a capitalist reality that isn't especially interested in helping you with that. (Indeed, it presents a more balanced view than Rent does, with a more sympathetic "sellout" character, making the tension much, much sharper.) It is set in the stage community in 1990, which means that AIDS is almost as central to the story as it is in Rent. (So there is a content warning for illness, and mortality in general, as topics.) You can feel the musical similarities -- Kate observed that in some places they were clearly adapting the orchestrations of Rent to play that up.

Lin-Manuel's Rolodex really deserves its own Producer credit: this production is astonishingly star-studded. Stephen Sondheim is a significant character (played by Bradley Whitford, except for one line recorded by Sondheim himself), and the show-stopper number is an homage to "Sunday", with walk-ons by a cast of Broadway legends that a Lincoln Center tribute could only dream of.

It's a great story, moreso for being more-or-less true. The music is delicious: nothing likely to become an anthem like La Vie Boheme, but you can see where that came from -- this was written between Superbia and Rent, and the evolution of his talent shows. That's where the melancholy comes from: it is very clear that he was hitting his stride, and one can only imagine what he might have accomplished if he hadn't died so young.

It's not quite Rent, but not many things are. Strongly recommended if you have Netflix.