Larson's THX-1138: "tick... tick... BOOM!"
Chris Klimek
Brandon Uranowitz in tick… tick… BOOM! (Teresa Castracane)
With chief theatre critic Peter Marks having abdicated, the Paper of Record looks to its loyal cadre of contributors to fill the void, at least for now. My review of the Kennedy Center’s new Neil Patrick Harris-directed tick… tick… BOOM!, an expansion of the 2001 three hander musical that was already upscaled from the “rock monologue” Jonathan Larson performed as a solo piece before creating RENT, is here.
It was my editor’s suggestion to move a comment I had calling this piece Larson’s THX-1138 up into the lede. It struck me that Superbia, the never-finished dystopian future-set musical that Larson laments he’s been working on for five years in tick…, sounds quite similar to the experimental film George Lucas made before finding fame with American Graffiti and Star Wars. Equally forbidding, equally uncommercial.