Today I will talk about one of my favorite films. In 2021 a musical movie called “Tick, Tick… BOOM!” was published on Netflix. This movie is about Jonathan Larson’s real-life story. The movie’s center is mostly on Jonathan’s first musical theater. Jonathan Larson is a musical theater writer who unfortunately died at a young age. He was a big part of Broadway in the 90s and maybe changed Broadway forever. While R&B style dominated Broadway musicals in those years, Jonathan Larson revived the “rock musical” concept, which is very famous today, on Broadway.
Jonathan Larson wrote the “tick, tick… BOOM!” after his first musical and it was a big success. After that, he finished writing “Rent” which he started to write a couple of years ago, but Jonathan passed away the day Rent previewed at the age of 35.
Let's talk about the Netflix movie. Tick Tick Boom is directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who previously wrote Hamilton. This is the first movie that is directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He says that he prepared this movie like he was workshopping a musical. While you are watching the movie you can see that they worked a lot for the pre-production. You can see the actors (especially Andrew Garfield who plays Jonathan Larson) actually took lessons and worked hard singing and playing the instruments, basically getting into the role.
One thing that I want to talk about is the “Come to Your Senses” scene. Lin Manuel Miranda and the writers of this film went to Washington D.C to view Jonathan Larson’s poems, notes, photos from the musicals, and the demo records of his songs. I think you can understand that they worked a lot to understand Jonathan’s emotions. In the Come to your senses scene you can see that Jonathan wrote about his own life, narrated by Susan. This part of the movie shows that Jonathan knew he was overworked.
Steven Levenson -the writer of tick tick boom- says that he was devastated because of the number of rejection letters Jonathan got. He says that they understand how hard his job was to keep going at what he was doing.
As I said tick tick boom is one of my favorite movies. I strongly suggest you see this movie, and I hope you liked it.
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