12 Things I Am Carrying With Me Because Of My Day With The Jonathan Larson Papers
Because I Am Having Trouble Thinking About Anything Else
A Midnight Facebook Status By Jennifer Ashley Tepper
Part 1
And All That Followed

1. Jonathan Larson wrote so many musicals. I was amazed as I read through not just Superbia, not just titles that super-fans have heard of... but ones that most of them never have. Manhattan Tower. M.T. House. Blocks. A musical stage adaptation of Polar Express. It goes on and on. This is a man who we know spent years struggling... but actually seeing it, actually looking at years of his life spent on musicals no one saw... it's fucking devastating beyond all measure. He was a hero to keep going. And thank god he did.

2. He also saved rejection letters. Dozens and dozens of them. Rejection letters from every theatre in New York. There's a rejection letter to Jonathan Larson from THE DUPLEX. He saved it.

3. M.T. House opens with a song called "White Male World", a commentary on society in the 1980s, through Larson's eyes. This is a man who, from the very beginning of his artistic existence, and all throughout without wavering, was trying to make stages both comment on, and look like, the world we live in. All of his shows are filled with interesting, three-dimensional female characters... people of every race and sexual identity...

4. Many of Jonathan's scripts and lyric pages and notepads of ideas feature other things in the margins - numbers of people he had to call, to do lists, drawings of boxes and coffee mugs, budgets for things like printing flyers and recording demos, drafts of letters to people including Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince and Joe Papp and Alan Alda. They are brimming with hope and the kind of fortitude only musical theatre writers have.

5. One of my favorite things I found was a handwritten letter, exuding passion and anger, from Jonathan to his alma mater, White Plains High School, when they chose to take away music classes taught by a beloved teacher. The letter is an outcry for arts education, written with such care and heart. Jon describes crying at what he sees going on in theatre, in schools, in America, and in New York where "theaters are even being TORN DOWN". And he says "I for one shall not sit back and passively watch it happen".

6. There are diner notepads filled with notes on things Jon had to do after work at the Moondance Diner. "Call ASCAP". "Submit to Goodspeed".

7. The amount of work Larson did to try to get 1984 produced... it rivals the perseverance of any musical theatre writer you can name. He was indefatigable. The unending letters! The knocking on every door! And when he finally tried to "bend with the road" and changed 1984 into Superbia... Superbia kind of led into tick tick BOOM... which kind of led into Rent. I'm simplifying a lot of things, but the point is that he kept going despite every setback. Even after an incredibly dismissive letter back regarding the rights to 1984, stating that "we are already discussing the possibility of a musical with a very well-known composer and an equally well-known script writer", he kept pushing and trying.

8. Ira Weitzman put Billy Aronson and Jonathan Larson together, giving birth to Rent. Just let that sink in. Every other musical you read about, Ira Weitzman was there in the shadows making it happen without shouting about getting credit for it. So I'll do it for him: IRA WEITZMAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

9. As I opened a research file about a musical Jonathan wrote, a small piece of paper flew out. It was a library call slip, just like the ones I was filling out to read about him... only it had been filled out by Jonathan Larson at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center as he was researching his own musical. An American Civil Liberties Union article on Obscenity and Censorship, call number *XMB-2063-CL147

10. I held the notepad that he was using the day that he died. It wasn't until I had it in my hands that I really understood what Greif has said for all these years: Rent wasn't finished. What we have is an incomplete show. That's as it should be.
But the in-depth notes about changes Jonathan was taking when he died are just like the notes that any of us would take at the final dress rehearsal of an off-Broadway premiere. The show would have changed at Jonathan's hand during its off-Broadway run and transfer to Broadway. But Rent isn't done because he wasn't done. And in his honor, what we have is what he left. I really get that now.

11. A page that said
"We are the doing.
Why can't we be the living?"

12. I leave you with this, from Jonathan Larson's unproduced, unheard, unremembered, unloved, completely fascinating and worthwhile and wonderful musical Manhattan Tower:
"It was twilight- and as I opened the window, the music of Manhattan came whirling in, singing a song not of the past- not of despair, but of the days to come. A clean healthy song, with words of hope and promise. A promise that someday the tower would be mine forever. Hours later I could still hear the faint strains of that music as I sat on the west bound train, watching darkness sail along the Hudson, and as I thought of my friends, and my dream, and my love- my sadness left me and I began to smile. For I knew that someday I would return- that I must return- for I left my heart behind in that tower. That tower in Manhattan."

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