Just as Miranda looked up to Larson, Larson idolized Sondheim. He played Larson’s character, alongside Leslie Odom Jr. In 2014, Miranda-who has long been inspired by Larson’s legacy-starred in a special two-week run of the show in between the workshop and Off-Broadway debut of Hamilton. It was posthumously adapted into a full-fledged musical (with assists from Larson’s college friend Victoria Leacock Hoffman, a producer, and Tony-winning playwright David Auburn) and several companies have performed it Off-Broadway since. He’d also written Tick, Tick…Boom! as an autobiographical story about trying to break into Broadway, and performed it as a one-man “rock monologue” in the same years he was developing Rent.
Larson died suddenly in 1996, on the morning of Rent’s first Off-Broadway preview show, and was never able to witness its enduring success.
Directed by Broadway game changer Miranda and adapted from a musical by Rent composer, lyricist, and writer Jonathan Larson, who was in turn inspired by musical legend Stephen Sondheim, the number features cameos by over a dozen Broadway icons in a fantastical sequence packed with enough Easter eggs to keep theater nerds pausing and rewinding for weeks. The song “Sunday,” a showstopper that comes early in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s feature directorial debut, Tick, Tick…Boom!, lasts only a few minutes, but it packs in four decades of Broadway history.