The Jonathan Larson Project – Southwark Playhouse Borough

Imelda Warren-Green, Natalie Kassanga, Max Harwood and Michael Mather in The Jonathan Larson Project at the Southwark Playhouse Borough, London. Picture: Danny Kaan

The Jonathan Larson Project continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London until 22 August 2026.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

The musical Rent has become a perennial hit since its debut in the mid-1990s, with a new West End revival due to open in September. The show’s success is partly due to its treatment of young urban people and the issues they face in ways that musical theatre had not previously attempted. But the show’s place in musical history is also tinged with a dark shadow: its creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly on the morning of its first Off-Broadway preview at the age of just 35.

But while Rent was to be Lawson’s final, greatest work, it did not exist in isolation. There was, of course, tick, tick… BOOM!, composed by Larson as a one-person autobiographical piece, expanded after his death into a three-person chamber musical. That show dealt with Lawson’s feelings of rejection after the failure of getting his previous musical, Superbia, off the ground.

Together Superbia, tick, tick… BOOM! and Rent have come to be recognised as the Larson canon. But as with so many composers, there are so many songs that were created and discarded along the way. Theatre historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper has dived through Larson’s archive to create a 90-minute revue of 18 songs (directed here by John Simpkins), most of which have never been heard before.

The Jonathan Larson Project opens with video footage of Larson, and the casts of various productions of Rent performing the show’s most memorable number, ‘Seasons of Love’. But the show only comes alive when the five onstage performers take control. The true opening number, ‘Greene Street’, is an ensemble ode to the messy hubbub of New York life, presaging that same sense of excitement that would power Rent.

There are several such ensemble numbers throughout, but it’s when the production dips into solo efforts that the cast members really show what they can do. ‘Break Out the Booze’ feels like a throwback to the Great American Songbook, albeit with a wry sense of nihilism that Cole Porter may have found amusing but would never have dared approach himself. Imelda Warren-Green’s performance is a virtuosic cabaret performance, complementing the much more vaudevillian singalong stylings of the following number, Marcus Collins leading the cast in a raucously saucy ‘Casual Sex, Pizza and Beer’. Together, the numbers suggest an affinity with musical theatre tradition married with an impishly modern take on life.

Warren-Green also solos in ‘Hosing the Furniture’, a demented take on 1930s ideas of the future in which housework is accomplished by turning a garden hose on the living room. Sondheim’s influence on Larson is at its most pronounced here, although even the great composer’s most unhinged characters would find this demented housewife a bit too psychotic.

That number won Larson the Stephen Sondheim Award, but otherwise feels like it possibly belongs back in the archive. There are a few such numbers present here, where it feels that were it not for Larson’s premature death they would have faded into obscurity. One such is ‘The Vision Thing’, which lampoons political spin doctors in an extended musical skit in which a female candidate for the Republican Party is encouraged to behave less like a politician and more like a centrefold model.

A better stab at attacking popular culture comes with Warren-Green and Natalie Kassanga performing ‘White Male World’, a barbed look at how patriarchy distorts the world to its desires. At times, Larson’s politically infused rage at the world feels rooted in his era; at others, all too depressingly current. But with no narrative drive to this revue, some of the energy in those numbers dissipates a little too rapidly.

It is when Larson’s work turns to the romantic that his talent truly shines through. Whether that’s a cut number from tick, tick… BOOM (‘Find the Key’) or the pure pop of ‘Pura Vida’, some songs really push home how disappointing it is that we have been deprived of another three decades of the composer’s creativity. Rent may be Jonathan Larson’s enduring legacy, but The Jonathan Larson Project helps to illustrate how there could have been so much more.

Scott Matthewman