‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’ reunites Andrew Garfield and Lin-Manuel Miranda

The New Yorker Jonathan Larson was a respected composer and playwright who died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm in 1996, at the age of 35, shortly before his musical Rent, about a group of young bohemians in the New York of the 90s, became a worldwide success. The play won Pulitzer and Tony Awards for Best Musical, and stayed on Broadway for twelve years.

That’s the character Andrew Gardfiel plays in Tick, Tick… Boom!, the film that marks the directorial debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda, a composer who has already triumphed on Broadway as the creator and star of musicals In the Heights (2008) and Hamilton (2015), and that the public can remember as Jack in the film The return of Mary Poppins (2018).

The story, whose world premiere was scheduled for last Friday and this Friday the 19th would arrive on Netflix, portrays Larson struggling to find success shortly before turning 30 years of age, at a time in his life in which he is absolutely stressed for having spent eight years writing and rewriting – and infinitely correcting – a musical work that puts him in a corner to consider whether he should give up the apparently sterile job of writing musical theater scripts.

Time passes (that is precisely what the name refers to Tick, Tick … Boom!) and Larson sees no progress in his work, which he makes while trying to survive as a cafeteria clerk and resided on a fifth floor with no elevator in lower Manhattan, inside an unheated apartment that he shared with two roommates and a couple of cats

“Here’s this posthumous musical of the kind that made me want to write musicals,” Miranda said of the motivation to undertake this project originally written and starred by Larson in 1990, with a high autobiographical component about his complications in writing the musical. Pride, and that playwright David Auburn produced again a decade later. Miranda saw him in 2001, which was an inspiration in her career.

The director commented to The New York Times who cast Garfield for the lead after seeing him in the 2018 Broadway production Angels in America and thought it was “momentous.” “I was thinking, ‘Oh, that guy can do anything,’” she recalled. “I didn’t know if I could sing, but I felt like I could do anything. So I chose it in my head probably a year before talking to him about it. “

During the preparation for the role, Garfield had a singing teacher and a piano teacher, since there are sequences in which he must sing and be skilled in front of the keys.

But those are just the technical aspects of a performance that Garfield plays very convincingly to portray a passionate and frustrated Larson, displaying him intensely in the world of drama, just as he did five years ago under Mel Gibson’s direction in To a man (2016).

“It’s kind of weird when there’s someone like Jon (Jonathan Larson) who you had no relationship with before, and then all of a sudden now there’s a mysterious connection forever that I’ll never let go,” Garfield told journalist Kyle Buchanan. (The New York Times) in a recent video call. “I feel so lucky that Jon was revealed to me, because now I don’t remember who he was before I knew who Jon was.”

Tick, Tick … Boom is part of the ever-rising career of the 38-year-old Garfiel, who recently appeared on Tammy Faye’s eyes like the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker.

In addition, fans of superhero movies are eating their nails at the possibility of seeing him again as Spider-Man in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which will be released in December with the leading role of Tom Holland and also with the possible appearance of Tobey Maguire… to add three masked men in the same film thanks to the multiverse! (E)