…Boom!
Mathias Krumbholz, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Tick, Tick…Boom! is up there with the other masterpieces I've mentioned in my blog this year, A Quiet Place Part II, The Night House, The Courier, and one I haven't mentioned yet, No Time to Die. It isn't normal for me to label a musical as a masterpiece because musicals typically don't fit in that specialty/art film category. Typically, musicals fail to utilize the full potential of cinematic storytelling and feel like recorded stage-plays rather than movies.
Two musicals came out this year that impressively managed to break free from that stigma, Dear Evan Hansen and Tick, Tick…Boom! Steven Levenson wrote both. Levenson is possibly the first screenwriter to adapt a play into a movie, fully realizing the stark contrast between the stage and screen as art forms. The only other film musical that managed to tell a story visually like those films was White Christmas, which was an original film. Even the great musicals celebrated by critics such as The Sound of Music or Singing in the Rain rely heavily on on-the-nose expositional dialogue to tell the story. In contrast, Levenson's films almost avoid that entirely.
Between Levenson's two writing credits this year, Tick, Tick…Boom! is superior because of its tighter structure.
Tick, Tick…Boom! won't just be recognized alongside this year's other masterpieces but also above those other films because it writes history with lightning.
"It is like writing history with lightning." was first coined by President Wilson to describe the film, The Birth of a Nation (Boggs). The saying has evolved to describe masterpieces that, through luck, become more consequential than the film itself.
Tick, Tick…Boom! is based on a musical monologue of the same name written and initially performed by Jonathan Larson, the creator of Rent.
It's an autobiographical monologue telling Larson's story of writing Superbia.
The most prominent theme of the movie was Leaving Your Mark vs. Time.
The film adaptation has Andrew Garfield playing Jonathan Larson. It uses re-enactments of Larson's original monologue juxtaposed with re-enactments of scenes from Larson's life as described in the monologue. This innovative way of storytelling is one of the ways this movie stood apart from other film musicals. Where most film musicals seem to copy and paste the stage-play script, Screenwriter Steven Levenson took the appropriate steps to adapt this story to the new medium fully.
Garfield successfully manages to transform himself into Larson through his acting, singing, and dancing.
All the performances in this film were incredible. Larson's music that the performers worked with added to the storytelling exponentially.
In his monologue, Larson tells the story of preparing his stage-play for an audience made up of producers and managers to market his musical. He explains his race against time, being that he's about to turn 30, the end of his youth, older than his idols were before they had their big break, older than his parents were when they started their careers and had two children.
This theme deepens as he finds out he could lose his best friend to HIV.
One difference between the stage play and the movie is that while the stage play was a love letter to Larson's mentor Stephen Sondheim, the play still kept him anonymous. The film paid homage to Sondheim in a different way. Bradley Whitford portrayed the no longer unnamed mentor. Before releasing the movie, Director Lin Manuel Miranda showed the real Stephen Sondheim a cut of the film. After watching it, Sondheim had some advice for Miranda on the scene where Sondheim leaves Larson a voice mail encouraging him to keep moving forward. While Sondheim appreciated the film's kind portrayal of him, he thought one of the lines in the voice-mail was cliché and asked if he could re-write it. Miranda wasn't going to reject a re-write from Sondheim. Whitford wasn't available to re-record the line, so the voice-mail at the end of the film isn't Whitford but is Stephen Sondheim's actual voice (Lenker). Yesterday, only 14 days after the release of the film adaptation of Tick, Tick…Boom! Stephen Sondheim passed away. The passing of this legend only adds more weight to the movie's theme.
Another way the movie is different from the play and writes history with lightning is it ends with Larson's death. At age 35, Larson died of an aortic aneurism the night before he scheduled his musical Rent to start previews at the New York Theater Workshop. Larson's passing is an event that he couldn't have known himself even when he first got on the stage and said, "Lately I've been hearing this sound, everywhere I go, tick, tick, tick like a time bomb in some cheesy B-movie or Saturday morning cartoon. A fuse has been lit; the clock counts down the seconds as the flame gets closer and closer and closer until all at once…."
Boggs, Joe, and Dennis Petrie. The Art of Watching Films. New York, McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Lenker, Maureen. "The Stephen Sondheim cameo you didn't realize was in Tick, Tick...Boom." Entertainment Weekly, 20 Nov. 2021.
