![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Viewers aren’t pushed into a world where thoughts and dialogue are sung rather, they’re invited to wade into it. ![]() Some scenes pair theatrical elements like big choreography and dance numbers with film-exclusive tools like unique editing and quick cuts to different locations. It’s the biggest number in the film, and it takes advantage of the capability of scope that film has and theatre lacks. This dreamy scene is proudly tongue-in-cheek. The song is born out of rhythms and conversations taking place in the diner and pauses to let Jonathan break out into song, soon conducting the entire choir of diner patrons before the walls collapse, and Jonathan leads the music to swell. “Sunday,” a song about Jonathan’s day job at a diner, was once a song that was sung by one man at a piano but transformed into a comically theatrical choral piece. The film paid close attention to whether or not each song would resonate in a movie. Other songs were similarly tweaked to make for a more functional genre jump. This sets the scene that much of the movie will be presented like a filmed version of the musical on stage and prepares the audience for atypical storytelling via a kind of meta-musical. Tick, Tick… Boom! opens with what looks like ‘90s video footage of Jonathan ( Andrew Garfield) at his piano before he appears performing the opening song on stage accompanied by two singers, just as he would’ve been in the three-person cast version of the stage musical. They all act together to help audiences suspend disbelief surrounding the dialogue that’s being sung and allow songs to complement a story about music persevering and the unstoppable ticking of the clock. Some songs appear in the musical within a musical while some are pared back to feel more organic and others are made into big, theatrical overtures. To accomplish this, the film follows two parallel worlds: Jonathan performing Tick, Tick… Boom! on stage and a gritty, naturalistic narrative following Jonathan’s life in the time leading up to writing Tick, Tick… Boom!. Songs are being written and performed as part of the plot while others are being sung in place of dialogue á la classic musicals. This line between naturalism and theatricality is walked with a delicacy rarely seen in movie musicals in this way. This allows the film to strike a chord between theatre and real life. Yet in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s film directorial debut, his bold choices mesh together elements that are an ode to musical theatre with the more intimate, realistic elements of a drama for the big screen. Tick, Tick… Boom! is about the turmoil Larson faced when approaching his thirtieth birthday and whether or not he should give up his dream to write musical theatre.Įven more so than others of its genre, a small movie musical about writing musicals had the capacity to fall flat for audiences there was a lot of potential for not fitting the scope of the big screen. The show is semi-autobiographical, written by playwright and composer, Jonathan Larson, who went on to write the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, Rent. Tick, Tick… Boom! started out as a “rock monologue” (AKA a one-man rock musical) before being developed into a still small and equally bare-bones three-actor piece. In many ways, Tick, Tick… Boom! is a musical for musical-lovers a story for theatre people. ![]()
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