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How Do You Measure a Career? The Jonathan Larson Project.
A revue of the Rent creator’s trunk songs and offcuts isn’t profound, but it’s moving all the same.
The cast of niche musical-theater regulars — Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus, Andy Mientus, and Jason Tam — appears in boho-chic drag playing a set of ’90s-ish characters in loose, Rent-like association. That’s the realm where Larson excels: his eye for a concise detail — on Greene Street, he observes “a man with a camera / His sunglasses shade his eyes” — though all the juvenilia leaves you wanting the better later work: You watch a witty-enough song like “Casual Sex, Pizza, and Beer” and spend most of the time thinking about, and wanting to hear, the greater density he’d later achieve with “La Vie Bohème.” When The Jonathan Larson Project jumps back to work like that, we get a sense of an artist with a lot of raw talent still in the process of figuring out how to hone it. The show ends with a series of such anthems, which tend to be powerfully, earnestly sung, like “Love Heals,” a piece written for an AIDS education foundation, to the point where the speakers get blown out in the sweep of emotion.
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