In this film version, Miranda gets to blow the lid off that simple interpretation with all the movie magic a Netflix budget will buy, and he takes full advantage. In 2001, an off-Broadway production finally gave the show a full staging, but even then, the cast remained small and the show only ever toured throughout North America (it did have a West End premiere in London in 2009). Tick, tick…BOOM is a small production Larson only ever performed it as a live-read, with two actors taking on the roles of Michael and Susan (and all the other bit parts) and a small band (he was on piano) accompanying them.
As the show opens, he’s about to turn 30 and, without anything near a hit to his name, he’s lamenting his life choices and how fast time flies opening number “30/90” is an upbeat anthem for heading into adulthood with as much optimism as nihilism. Andrew Garfield stars as Jon (whom we know is Larson), an aspiring musical composer who cannot seem to catch a break. Smartly, Miranda (and screenwriter Steven Levenson, who also adapted, to much more disastrous results, this year’s Dear Evan Hansen) bookends tick, tick…BOOM around Larson’s real life and RENT launching into the pop culture zeitgeist, giving the intervening story an immediate sense of time and place. RENT premiered on Broadway in 1996 and in the 25 years since, it has become a signature work evoking a certain turbulent moment in American life, the turn of a millennium with a deadly virus ravaging the country and burgeoning technology threatening to forever alter our way of life.
Larson is best known for creating a show that would, after his passing, go on to change the very shape of American musical theater. And it turns out, he’s capable of making a pretty decent movie musical, particularly one originally written by a man who, until his untimely death in 1996, might have turned out to be a Lin-Manuel Miranda 30 years before Lin-Manuel Miranda himself. In the midst of all of that, Miranda found his way to the director’s chair for the first time, helming the screen adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s semi-biographical musical tick, tick…BOOM, now in select theaters and streaming on Netflix. Since then, he’s produced the filmed version of that show for Disney+ as well as a film adaptation of his first musical, In the Heights contributed music to two animated films ( Vivo and Encanto) and is in post-production on an upcoming live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid. In his very productive waking hours, Miranda has seemingly not stopped creating since moving on from starring in his blockbuster show, Hamilton, in 2016. It’s not entirely clear when (or if) Lin-Manuel Miranda sleeps, but really, that’s his personal business.