Review: The Jonathan Larson Project
[Southwark Playhouse Borough || July 9th to August 22nd 2026 || 1h 25m]
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s sudden and unexpected death from an aortic dissection at the age of just 35. In a cruel twist of fate, he passed away on the eve of the first off-Broadway preview performance of the one complete musical that he published in his lifetime, Rent, which went on to become one of the most successful Broadway shows of all time. In the years since, Larson’s popularity and legacy have only grown. Rent was adapted into a (not very good) film in 2005 and is being revived in London later this year, with Stranger Things alumnus Gaten Matarazzo in the role of Mark. Tick… Tick… Boom!, a semi-autobiographical project Larson had been working on for years, was revised by David Auburn and premiered off-Broadway in 2001, before also being adapted into a film twenty years later, while an album of previously unheard and unproduced songs from which this show takes its name was released in 2019.
There’s a lamentable poetry to Larson’s death. Rent, a musical about New York creatives living beneath the kosh of the HIV/AIDS crisis, features a number of characters whose lives are cut short and whose legacies, like Larson’s, are ultimately cursed with hypotheticals. What might they have achieved had they been given the chance? What stories might they have told; what lives might they have changed? The same can all be asked of Larson. It’s impossible to know whether Rent would have been such a success had Larson lived to see it, or whether he would have finished Tick… Tick… Boom!, or whether Suburbia, his musical inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, would ever have been produced. As the cliché goes, some artists truly are only appreciated in death, and we’ll never know for sure whether that is true of Larson.
The Jonathan Larson Project, a showcase of previously unheard songs written by Larson in the 80s and 90s, has an answer to that question however. It posits, albeit without explicitly saying so, that had he lived, Larson might well have been as prolific and loved as Sondheim. The show, which stages the compilation album in the form of a concert, has no narrative but rather serves as a joyful celebration of Larson’s life, work and knack for lyrical storytelling, bookended by a short eulogy. The various songs are woven into a quasi-memorial for the man, with five singers, whose character names are listed simply as “Man 1”, “Woman 2” and so on, performing them variously as though they form part of a musical, a solo concert or the aforementioned eulogy, with each of the five performers given at least one solo number to demonstrate their individual talent.
The lack of a plot tying the songs together makes for a ramshackle and sometimes erratic experience, though it's one that flickers and fizzes with high energy and an unerring appreciation and love for Larson. The songs run the gamut from those that wouldn't feel out of place in a Sondheim musical (the delightful “Hosing the Furniture”) to beautiful laments about loss and insecurity (“Love Heals”; “Rhapsody”) and catchy pop ditties that demonstrate Larson's enviable ability to write an earworm (“Pura Vida”), all of which serve to remind us of what we lost thirty years ago. The show moves at pace, with little time for the audience to digest the previous number, but this too heightens the frenetic, ‘theatre kid’ energy of it all, which feels fittingly Larson.
The five performers are all solid, with X Factor 2011 finalist Marcus Collins (!) and Georgie Butler, understudying for Imelda Warren-Green, proving especially strong with their soulful, passionate vocals, particular in their solo numbers. Michael Mather - beautiful, breathtaking, til-the-walls-were-peeling - brings a brooding aura to some of the more contemplative and tender songs, while Max Harwood, who is perhaps best known for playing the lead in the film adaptation of Everybody's Talking About Jamie, brings a giddy, twinky dynamism to the piece that is surely a prerequisite of any Jonathan Larson production. Collectively, they exude a geniality and warmth that makes it easy to root for them and to feel as though we too are a part of this celebration of life, and they are all at the very least pleasant to listen to.
It's a real shame then that generative AI is used in some of the video projections that complement the songs. This is absolutely no fault of the performers, who make this show what it is and who deserve all the praise and plaudits, but it is a genuine disgrace that what is supposed to be a showcase of Jonathan Larson's creativity is marred by something so aesthetically and morally ugly. No excuse can be made for this - it's inauthentic and it is fundamentally at odds with what this show is meant to be about - and those responsible for its inclusion deserve all the opprobrium and condemnation hurled their way. It makes the show difficult to recommend, which is unfair on the performers and musicians and technical teams who have worked so hard on it, and I hope, should the show ever return or transfer, that this poison is extracted from it without delay.
Tickets for The Jonathan Larson Project are available here.