Lin-Manuel Miranda Goes in Search of Lost Time

The musical “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” is, in a word, haunted. When Jonathan Larson wrote it, he was a struggling theatre composer facing down his thirtieth birthday, despondent after years of rejection for his dystopian rock musical, “Superbia.” In the fall of 1990, Larson workshopped a new one-man show, originally titled “Boho Days,” about a frustrated composer named Jonathan who was turning thirty. The next year, it was renamed “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” Larson, accompanied by a band, sat at a piano and griped, in song, about his stalled career and his desperation for a breakout hit. The “Tick, Tick” of the title was the insistent warning in his ears—after all, his idol, Stephen Sondheim, had opened his first Broadway show when he was twenty-seven. “They’re singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ / You just want to lay down and cry,” Larson sang. Soon after, Larson did write a breakthrough musical, but he didn’t live to see its success. He died in 1996, of an aortic aneurysm, hours before the first scheduled Off Broadway performance of “Rent.”

Five years later, the playwright David Auburn adapted “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” into a three-person Off Broadway musical. The show was now a portrait of an artist on the cusp of global success, unaware that the acclaim he longed for would coincide with his death, and the ticking clock took on a prescient new meaning. One of the audience members was a college senior named Lin-Manuel Miranda. Like Larson, he would hustle through the theatre world in his twenties before writing a transformative Broadway hit in his thirties—but, unlike Larson, he lived to see it conquer the world. Miranda has now followed up “Hamilton” with a film version of “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!,” his directorial début, which arrives on Netflix this week. Miranda has expanded what was once a solo show even further, re-creating Larson’s bohemian New York of 1990 and employing a sprawling cast led by Andrew Garfield, as Jonathan. When I spoke to Miranda recently, over Zoom, he was at his home office, in Washington Heights, which looked a lot like Jonathan’s in the film—keyboard by the window, busy bookshelves—with the exception of a few Tony and Grammy Awards. He had just come from a “brief but vigorous game of handball,” and we got to talking about the artistic life, the difficulties of success, and the strange circumstances that created “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!”

We began our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, discussing a scene in which Jonathan, after banging his head against an unwritten song, goes swimming in a public pool and has a musical epiphany mid-lap.

I live two blocks from that pool.

No way! That’s a great place to start.

The pool? Let’s go for it.

So, the first field trip we took was to the Library of Congress [where Larson’s papers are kept], and we found the song “Swimming,” which Jonathan used to perform as part of “Boho Days.” But it was cut for the Off Broadway version, and you can see why. It’s a total stream-of-consciousness song. You realize, Oh, this only makes sense if you’re swimming at that speed. It’s actually more cinematic than it is stageable, and so I was, like, This is going in our movie. Then our location manager was looking at pools for us. I pushed for the one at Hunter College, because that’s the one I swam in during eighth grade. And then there was the one two blocks from you. When we got there, we realized: this was where Jonathan actually swam, because there are lyrics that only make sense at that particular pool: “red stripe, green stripe, forty feet, fifty feet.” That’s the tiling in that pool.

There’s a lyric in that song that really stuck out: “Can I make it to forty?” That seems to sum up the weird black magic of this musical.

Like so much in this show, it is poignant, literal, and figurative. It’s literal, because he’s looking at the ten-foot marks at the bottom of the pool. It’s figurative, because Jonathan’s writing about turning thirty. And it’s poignant, because he never reached forty. He does so much singing about the big deal of this decade that makes any of us over thirty kind of roll our eyes, but he never reached forty. He never reached thirty-six.

Let’s back up. The show is so much about the finite time that artists have to do their work, and you are someone who I imagine, post-“Hamilton,” could do pretty much anything you wanted. Why direct a movie of this relatively obscure Off Broadway musical?

The simplest answer is because the story is very foundational to me. That show had been swimming around in my subconscious for as long as I’ve wanted to do this for a living. I thought my chapter with it was closed when I was lucky enough to play it at City Center, in 2014. I got to play Jonathan, and it is the most surreal production in my mind, because it was just before my life changed with “Hamilton.” It was with my future co-star Leslie Odom, Jr., and my past co-star Karen Olivo. And it’s exactly where I was at.

You mean you were where Jonathan was in his career when he was writing the show?

I mean I was in this limbo. I knew that I was in between one thing and the next, and the show is very much about that. But, to rewind even further, when I first saw the Off Broadway production, it felt like a message in a bottle just for me. I was a senior in college, about to graduate with a degree in theatre studies, and it was the month after September 11th, when everyone was questioning everything. The way I experienced it was, like, “Hey, that pretty girl sitting next to you who’s a talented actress is not going to be your girlfriend anymore, and she’s not going to be an actress. Your other friends who are so brilliant and are studying the arts are all going to grow up and get real jobs. You’re going to be the only idiot smashing your head against their childhood dream. And, if it’s worth it to you, it’s worth it. But it’s really fucking hard.” My girlfriend at the time—apparently I ditched her after the show. I don’t remember this, but I was, like, “I gotta go,” and walked off into the night. I think I had the presence of mind to put her in a cab. But I just was, like, I have to go think about my life. I went back and saw it three times.

What had been your relationship with “Rent”?

I experienced “Rent” in a similar way. I saw it for my seventeenth birthday. It was the first truly contemporary musical I had ever seen. I remember thinking, This takes place now? In New York? Downtown? The fact that Jonathan died young loomed large in my imagination before I even walked into the theatre. I was a very morbid kid. I had a poster of Brandon Lee on my wall. I was really haunted by promise cut short. Always had been. The show felt so personal and homemade, and I didn’t know musicals could feel like that. I grew up in the era of “Phantom” and “Cats,” these extravaganzas, and here are these lyrics about “throw down the keys so I can get into your building”—which was true when we went to 508 Greenwich [Larson’s apartment building] to film. There’s a phone booth across the street you would call Jonathan’s apartment from, and he would throw his key down, because their buzzer was busted.

This musical began as a one-man show, but your movie is pretty large in scope. Can you talk about building out the world using what was already available? It almost seems like you and Steven Levenson, the screenwriter, were collaborating with a ghost.

I think musical films need a strong frame to allow the suspension of disbelief—when the camera’s right up here, it’s hard to buy someone breaking into song. So my conceit was: as soon as his fingers touch the keys, we’re in the world of Jonathan Larson. That can be very real, and that can be as unreliable as we need it to be. That was a liberating concept. In the casting of “Rent,” you saw the most diverse cast you’d ever seen on Broadway. There’s a quote from the book on the making of “Rent,” when Jonathan invited everyone to his apartment for the peasants’ feast. He said, “This is a musical about my friends, and you’re all playing my friends.” I took that as an invitation to cast this as diversely as possible, because when he cast his friends he cast as diversely as possible. Then we talked to folks—never setting out to make “St. Jonathan,” because no one who knew him would argue that he was a saint. He was a tough collaborator. He could really get in his own way when he felt like he was right.

Did you talk to the people who inspired the characters in the show, like his friend Michael [a former actor who contracts H.I.V.] and his girlfriend Susan [a dancer who leaves Jonathan to take a job upstate]?

Yeah. His friend Matt O’Grady, who is the basis for Michael, he’s still alive and healthy—healthier than any of us. He’s, like, a champion swimmer. Sometimes they would tell us the details of the story and we’d go back with the essence. Jonathan always gave the mundane things a sense of occasion: “It’s not that we have no money for groceries. We’re having a picnic on the roof!” The party he throws for Susan at the beginning of the movie, it’s, like, “You don’t have the money to do this.” “No, I’ll sell some books and we’ll have a party!” He would throw these parties and make programs where he would list everyone who was invited and what they accomplished that year. He really loved to celebrate his friends.

Then we talked to Jonathan’s girlfriend at the time, who, by the way, is still dancing. She had her own issues with how Jonathan wrote about her. She was, like, “I never wanted to move to an ashram.” It’s more hippie-dippie in his telling, so we made it more about the dancer’s plight. Who thinks about time running out more than fucking dancers? You’re always working within your body, and that is its own ticking clock. So they’re making choices, but they’re not wrong. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have health insurance. There’s nothing wrong with dancing somewhere that’s not New York. Most people in life don’t actually get to do what they love for a living. It’s usually just the thing that keeps their soul alive while they pay the bills.

There are so many layers of meta in this movie. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say “meta” anymore without paying Mark Zuckerberg a dollar.

Aw, no! [Snaps his fingers.]

But there’s a web of parallels running underneath the musical. One is that the “tick, tick” that Jonathan heard when he wrote it was about turning thirty, but by the time the musical was Off Broadway it was about how he had six years left to live. And the way he died, an aneurysm—it’s like his body went tick, tick, boom. Could you talk about adapting a musical where the creator didn’t understand what its ultimate meaning would be?

Don’t you find that’s also true of anything you write? You learn why it was so important to you midway through, or after writing it. You could say that “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” is Jonathan being ticked off that nobody produced “Superbia.” On the surface level, it’s very easily that. He spent his twenties writing a musical, and everyone said, “You’re very talented. What else?” And he was seeing lots of playwrights have success in the one-person-show genre. This was the era of Eric Bogosian, of John Leguizamo doing “Mambo Mouth.” So he said, “If my shit is too expensive, if my musical’s too big or too weird, tell me it’s too expensive to have me at a piano with a band.” There is a bit of punk rock in it. And then, on another level, he wrote his own “8 Mile,” yet he never lived to see himself become Eminem. That’s part of what hit me so hard about it when I saw “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” Off Broadway: that he understood so much, and yet at a certain level you can’t let yourself understand. You don’t know the day you’re going to die. On a subcellular level, he understands there’s a clock ticking. I think we all have moments where we allow ourselves to hear that ticking and times when we can’t listen to it, in order to stay sane.

That leads me to another parallel, which is between Jonathan Larson and Alexander Hamilton. I kept thinking of the line from “Hamilton,” “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” Hamilton was also someone who had a ticking clock and died before he was done, and didn’t get to see his legacy—as you write, the “garden you never get to see.” Were you noticing those parallels?

I think I’m drawn to characters who are aware of that. For Alexander Hamilton, it was the trauma of his early life. This is a guy whose mother died in bed with him when they were both sick. You’re going to hear a ticking clock after that. And, for Jonathan, the AIDS crisis was unfolding and spreading all around him, and he was losing friends. That magnifies the sound of that ticking. As I was doing pre-production, I was also working on “The Little Mermaid” with Alan Menken, writing new music. And Alan Menken’s creative partner was Howard Ashman, who we lost to AIDS in 1991—this era that has stolen so much incredible work from us. I’m naturally drawn to people who feel that urgency, because I felt that urgency very acutely when I was younger. I’ve mellowed a bit. Therapy’s great!

That also makes me think of “Fosse/Verdon,” which you executive-produced. The series borrowed the conceit from Sam Wasson’s biography of every chapter being titled “Twenty Years” or “Seven Years” or “One Hour and Fifty-Three Minutes,” like a time bomb. Fosse was another person who had a ticking clock.

And ended the movie [“All That Jazz”] with a shot of the body! It’s Roy Scheider getting zipped up.

Exactly. “All That Jazz,” like “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!,” is a creator’s premonition of his own death.

And no offense to Sam Wasson—who is a good friend of mine from Wesleyan—but the table of contents is almost the most brilliant thing in the book. I remember turning the page and going, Holy shit, how has no one ever done this? I think you can see the Fosse influence in “Tick, Tick” as well. Everything I’ve done since “Hamilton” has been the film school I couldn’t afford: going to work for Rob Marshall [in “Mary Poppins Returns”], getting to executive-produce “Fosse/Verdon” and deep-dive into that guy’s brain and life and collaboration with Gwen [Verdon]. And then shadowing Jon [Chu] on “In the Heights,” where the biggest lesson was: don’t ask for permission. Swing as big as you can. You have the right to take up space. So, when we got to the “Sunday” diner sequence, it was, like, Well, shit, Jonathan only ever heard this as himself at a piano. What is the galaxy-brain choir of Jonathan Larson’s dreams?

That “Sunday” song—I have been warned by Netflix not to spoil any of it, so we can’t talk in specifics. Without giving too much away, Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park with George” is an important motif in “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!,” as is Sondheim himself, who is played brilliantly by Bradley Whitford. Can you talk about the role that Sondheim played in Jonathan’s life?

Well, there’s another filter with which to view “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!,” which is that Jonathan is so in thrall to his heroes, and his work is still in service of his heroes. Just like, if you saw the first draft of “In the Heights,” you realize, Oh, this kid loves “Rent,” and this is like a Latin “Rent.” In a lot of ways, “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” is “Company” mixed with “Sunday.” It’s someone on the verge of turning thirty, and it’s a portrait of an artist trying to find their way. Sondheim was a mentor of Jonathan’s at one of these songwriting workshops. I actually tweeted the recommendation letter that Sondheim wrote for Jon that we found in the archives, which is such a mike drop of a letter. If I ever got this letter I would never stop weeping. I sometimes lament how much more writing Sondheim could have done if he weren’t such a generous mentor to so many generations of artists, myself included. But he’s so generous with what he knows, because that’s the gift he got from Oscar Hammerstein II.

When I screened the movie for Sondheim, he e-mailed me and said, “You treated me very gently and royally, for which I am grateful.” But he said, “One thing: the last voice-mail message to Jon, it sounds a little cliché. ‘I have a feeling you’re going to have a very bright future.’ I would never say that. Can I please rewrite what Sondheim says in the voice mail? I’ll record it if you can’t get the actor back.’ ”

I was going to ask you if that was Sondheim on the answering machine, because it sounds a lot like him.

I’m not turning down a Sondheim rewrite!

What did he say in his rewrite?

He said, “It’s first-rate work and has a future, and so do you. I’ll call you later with some thoughts, if that’s O.K. Meanwhile, be proud.” Which is so much more specific and beautiful. I took a gamble, because [by that point in the movie] we haven’t heard Bradley’s voice in about an hour and a half, so I think I can get away with the genuine article on the voice mail, and the folks who know will know.

Did you talk to Sondheim about Jonathan?

Every step of the way. I showed him the scenes in which he was depicted. I let him know when Bradley Whitford was cast, and he said, “I don’t know who that is, but he has a name like a Jane Austen character, and I love it.”

We gotta get him some “West Wing” DVDs! Can you describe the role that Sondheim has played in your life? Is it similar to the one he had with Jonathan?

It was a similar one of encouragement. My first real sitdown with him happened after “In the Heights,” just before [writing Spanish lyrics for] the “West Side Story” revival. I went to his house, and it was maybe five minutes on “West Side Story.” Like, “I don’t speak Spanish, but it should rhyme in the same places.” Which is actually not easy when you get to “I Feel Pretty.” Then he said, “What else are you working on?” And I told him, “I’m working on this hip-hop album, like a ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ concept album about Alexander Hamilton.” And he threw back his head and guffawed, and he said, “No one will expect that from you. That’s amazing. Keep writing that.” I would send him what I was working on every few years or so, and he said, “Lin, with hip-hop, ten bars in I’m nodding my head and then I stop listening to the lyrics, because the rhythm is so insistent. So keep surprising us.” That was his big thing: variety. That’s the trap of pop music in musical theatre. If you can keep our ear hooked, we’ll keep listening. And then I remember he was really knocked out by “Say No to This.” That one word of encouragement keeps you going for two years. That’s fuel.

It’s funny he responded to that song, because I think of him as the master of ambivalence in musical theatre, and that song is about ambivalence.

It’s deeply ambivalent.

Hamilton wants to cheat, but he also wants to not cheat.

And everyone’s screaming, “No!”

“Sunday in the Park with George” is part of the DNA of “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” It’s also a musical about an artist—in this case the painter Georges Seurat—trying to create, and the characters in “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” watch it on TV.

That was our way of contextualizing it for folks who aren’t familiar with it: this is something that’s swimming in Jonathan’s brain.

There’s a scene where Jonathan’s girlfriend breaks up with him, in the song “Therapy,” which to me had some explicit parallels to “We Do Not Belong Together,” from “Sunday.” Susan even says, “Tell me not to go,” which is what Seurat’s mistress, Dot, says to him.

I had not even made that connection until you just said it. Our challenge with “Therapy” is that it kills in a theatre, but it’s kind of cute. It’s a funny, glib number making fun of the way you speak in couples therapy. That’s where we’re most explicitly getting our Fosse on, in that we’re cutting between this very cutesy song and this knockdown, drag-out fight, where people are saying how they really feel. And this is the “Sunday”-est part of it, but I don’t think it’s a “Sunday” reference, as much as what “Sunday” gets right about artists—which is that there’s a part of you “always standing by, mapping out a sky.” She catches him playing piano on her back. The dirty secret of sharing a life with an artist is that, in our brains, the mike is always hot. Any fight, any moment we’re living is ripe for usage.

This gets to the biggest parallel, the implicit one between you and Jonathan. This is someone who wants to create a breakout hit of musical theatre, and he in fact did that, and it brought in a contemporary sound to Broadway. You did all those things in “Hamilton” but, unlike Jonathan, lived to see its success. Did you feel like you were living his unlived life?

Not that so much. Honestly, there were so many times I just mourned the fact that I didn’t have him to talk to about it. He would be mad at me about stuff and thrilled about stuff. He’d be sixty-one years old—exactly twenty years older than me. So you have to have those fights with yourself. I am keenly aware of the unfairness of the fact that I lived, even though I was very morbid and thought I was going to die all the time when I was young. How can I pay that debt back to Jonathan? I didn’t want to write new music for this. There’s all this unheard Jonathan Larson music. The moment where he’s driving through the Ninety-sixth Street transverse with Michael and there’s this 1010 WINS-ish theme coming out of the car radio—that’s a rejected CNN jingle that he wrote. The whole thing is a gesture toward the fact that there’s more Jonathan Larson music that the world hasn’t heard yet.

At the same time, you and Jonathan Larson are part of a very small club of people who’ve written transformative musicals, including Sondheim and Hammerstein, this chain of people who knew one another through the decades. You must have thought about the fact that what he wants so badly in this musical is something that only a tiny handful of people have lived.

And also that he was right, and that musical theatre had a rebirth, because he ended the conversation about popular music and theatre music being friends again. “Rent” wasn’t the first rock musical, but it certainly ended the conversation and the fucking think pieces: “Does Rock Belong on Broadway?” Look on Broadway now. It’s harder to find a non-rock musical. “Jagged Little Pill” is next to the Temptations, next to Tina Turner. It’s all rock music. It’s Jonathan Larson’s Broadway now, and that is not the Broadway that Jonathan came up in. So it’s not just me—it is really a generation of folks who took that thesis and expanded on it. I did it in my little corner of hip-hop and Latin music, the music that I grew up with. But so did Tom Kitt and Jason Robert Brown and Joe Iconis and Shaina Taub.

Are there things you’ve learned about success that you think Jonathan didn’t understand?

The tricky thing that happens is it goes from this thing that’s in your head and, if it has the kind of success that a “Rent” or a “Hamilton” has had, becomes a thing that’s separate from you. I struggle to think what Jonathan would have made of “Team America: World Police” singing “Everyone has AIDS! AIDS AIDS AIDS!” That is a very loving spoof, but it’s a fucking takedown of “Rent.” I hang out in the Drama Book Shop, and I see books about “Hamilton” that I didn’t know existed. “Hamilton” and the law, “Hamilton” and philosophy. There’s a point at which you kind of go, I made this thing and now it is the world’s. Jonathan never really got to experience that. It’s a very weird feeling, because at the same time people are talking about a phenomenon they’re talking about this thing that you were up all night riding the train writing. It’s not unlike having a kid who goes on to some kind of notoriety or acclaim. They are this thing to the world, but they were in your arms first.

There’s also the sophomore syndrome of having a big hit. He would have had to come up with another show to follow “Rent,” just as you are in this post-“Hamilton” period and the project that you have chosen, among several others, is “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!”

The stark reality is that the rest of my life is a post-“Hamilton” period. Things connecting with the culture in that way, that happens once every twenty years. The odds that it will be me the next time it happens are slim to none. But I took my inspiration once “Hamilton” happened from Robert Rodriguez, who was, like, the best way to avoid a sophomore slump is to do so much different shit that no one can tell what your sophomore project is. He did “Desperado,” and then he directed a part of “Four Rooms” and a series for Showtime, and a lot of different things. To be making is the most important thing, because we also know how many works of art we appreciate now that we didn’t appreciate when the artist was around, or in its original incarnation. The initial reception of something is just the first draft of its reception. That’s another important perspective that Jonathan never got to experience.

Also, once something breaks through, especially something that brings a new kind of representation to the art form, people don’t feel represented enough by it and start to critique it, which has happened with “Rent” and “Hamilton” in different ways.

For sure. Every time you make a frame, people are going to point out what’s not in the frame. And you go and you make the next thing. That’s all that you can do, keep your head down and keep making shit.

There’s been a slight revision in the choreography of “Hamilton” when it reopened, of the Sally Hemings character turning away from Jefferson. This seems to have grown out of a conversation that’s been going on for a couple of years about slavery and “Hamilton.” I’d love to hear your perspective on making that change.

There was a larger discussion around that moment, particularly when the movie came out on Disney+. Sally Hemings, although we are Black and brown bodies playing all these characters, is the only historically Black body that is named in the show. And Tommy [Kail, the director] said, “I want to revisit this.” There were difficult and thoughtful conversations about how to re-approach it. It was very inclusive of the companies—not just the company on Broadway but all the companies. It gets to a stickier and messier truth inside of itself, and our companies are feeling good about it. And what a silver lining, that we all had a new rehearsal process and the chance to explore something new.

A trans actor from “Hamilton,” Suni Reid, recently filed a complaint against the show saying they experienced “frequent incidents of discrimination and harassment” after asking for a gender-neutral dressing room, and they said the production refused to renew their contract after that. [The producers denied this.]

I can’t really comment on it, because it’s legal. I just can’t.

How involved are you in the daily workings of the show still?

Not so much, other than checking in as we were reopening. I was much more checked in with everyone when we shut down. Zooms with every company. I can tell you, for our part, that we paid everyone’s health insurance throughout the pandemic. We created an emergency fund for folks, if someone was having trouble making rent. I check in when there are new people being cast in principal roles, and that’s about it.

Does it worry you that there was this alleged discontent with a cast member? Do you want to do anything differently with your own involvement in the production?

You always want everyone involved in your show to have the most positive experience possible. And we put things in place that were not in place prior to the pandemic. We have an H.R. department now, which we always should have had. So there was a lot of work that happened so that everyone feels safe and happy and proud of where they work.

This also came after the colorism conversation with “In the Heights” over the summer. Now that you’re Lin-Manuel Miranda, Inc., it’s no longer you as a Jonathan Larson figure trying to break through. It’s all these people involved in all these projects and the masses of audiences who look to them for a certain thing. Has that changed your perception of your own sense of responsibility, of how you want to conduct your working life?

Once something has success, you’re not the underdog trying to make it happen anymore. You have to graduate past the mind-set of, like, It’s a miracle I got something on the stage. Because now that is expected of me. And people go, “Yeah, but what about this? And what about this?” And that’s fair! I do that with art I find lacking. It’s not cancellation. That’s having opinions. So I try to take it in that spirit. The challenge I find myself in is, how do I stay hungry? How do I still feel like I have something to say and not worry about what is not in the frame? I’m just trying to build the frame in the first place. Certainly, I have learned lessons from the reception of my work, good, bad, and indifferent. You try to take all of it, and whatever sticks to your gut is what you bring with you to your next project.

The challenge becomes, how do I stay as hungry as Jonathan Larson was at twenty-nine? How do I stay as hungry as I was at thirty-four? That last song is all questions, but the real question is: Fear or love? If you get yourself into a place of fear, of “What are people going to say about what I write?,” you’re fucked. It’s over. And that’s a place I have to really push past now in a different way. At the end of the day, you can’t control how the world receives something. All you can control is what your intentions were. And, if it closes in a night, those six years don’t feel like wasted time, because you learned from it and you put everything you had into it. Working on “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!” was a wonderful place to live, reconnecting to that place of just getting it out of your head and onto the stage, and it being that simple.