Playwright: music, lyrics and book by Jonathan Larson
At: Pegasus Players at Truman College's O'Rourke Center, 1145 W. Wilson
Phone: ( 773 ) 878-9761; $17-$25
Runs through: June 25
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Our hero/narrator is a musician living in the South-of-Houston district of Manhattan. It is 1990, his 30th birthday approaches and, with it, a reminder of just how long he's been proclaimed a 'promising young composer.' His childhood buddy has abandoned the vie de bohéme to become a Madison Avenue suit, and his girlfriend wants to move to the country ( Cape Cod, but this is New York City, remember ) . His ambitions ride on a workshop production of his play-with-music that he hopes will be to his own age as revolutionary as the 'tribal love-rock musical' Hair was to earlier generations.
Well, did he succeed? Songsmith Jon's function as a surrogate for the ill-titled tick, tick ... BOOM!'s author, Jonathan Larson—soon to become the LATE Jonathan Larson—is obvious. Also a matter of record was the sweeping success of Rent, his 1996 masterpiece that garnered multiple awards and spawned a cult audienc. But necrolatry aside, what does this prototype offer to justify its production in 2006? For though Larson's infectious, if high-calorie, score strives to fuse Beatles and Brigadoon, the influence of his idol, Stephen Sondheim, still makes for a pop-idiom cluttered with big-lung/small-sinus fermatas and warp-speed patter not all THAT far removed from those Jon-as-Larson disdains.
This contradiction may not be entirely Larson's fault. Ilesa Duncan's direction and Eric Ford's dance choreography contribute prodigious variety and intelligence to an undeniably flimsy text, further impaired by acoustics rendering many of the lyrics unintelligible, even for playgoers seated at lip-reading range. But however capable the three actors who portray Larson's array of indigenous archetypes, only Michael Ingersoll's Jon departs from Broadway-style vocal technique to present us with an artist exhibiting not just the obligatory Salingeresque cuddliness, but a gritty passion so evocative of his urban milieu that we can almost smell the Coney Island Red Hots.