10 November 2021, The Tablet

Reaching for heaven


Reaching for heaven
 

tick, tick…BOOM!
Director: Lin-Manuel Miranda

tick, tick…BOOM! is adapted from Jonathan Larson’s 1991 autobiographical musical about a struggling young theatre composer in New York City agonising over whether he’s right to keep pursuing his dream. In real life, Larson would go on to write the multi-award-winning musical Rent, one of the longest-running shows on Broadway, although tragically he never knew that his work would achieve such acclaim because, aged 35, he died suddenly of an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm the night before the show’s off-Broadway preview.

This new film version is directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the 2015 global smash hit Hamilton. He was inspired to write for musical theatre after seeing Rent on his seventeenth birthday, and he’s described the show as his “north star”. One can’t help feeling that the exuberant confidence he brings to his debut as a film director would have been shared by Larson had he survived to build on the equally stunning success of his own work.

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