Jonathan Larson was born on February 4, 1960 in White Plains, about 30 minutes outside New York City. He had a sister and loving parents who took them into town to see shows. They once took him to see the puppet version of La Boheme when he was 5 years old. By the time he was in kindergarten he was doing things like gathering friends into productions of Gilligan's Island in their backyards. By third grade he had written, directed, and starred in his own play. And by high school he was so famous as an actor that his school which had no musical theater program made one to accommodate his talents. He ended up winning a four-year, full-tuition acting scholarship to Adelphi University. For the first time he wrote musicals of his own, and discovered he was quite good at it. His professors remembered him as the best song writer they'd ever seen. In his senior year he wrote a letter to Stephen Sondheim. It was the kind of letter a young man writes when he is on the look out for a mentor. A few months before graduation Sondheim invited Jon to his house for some advice. Jon told the composer he had trained as an actor but loved writing music. Sondheim advised him to quite preforming. He said, "There are a lot more starving actors than there are starving composers."
Jon lived a bohemian life in downtown New York. He rented a scruffy loft that had a bathtub in the kitchen and a crumbling water closet. He had thick extension cords running all along the baseboards to feed his computer, synthesizer, and tape decks. For a while he and his roommate owned an illegal wood burning stove(like what Roger and Mark had in RENT!) Jon was a waiter at a SoHo restaurant called the Moondance Diner. He dated a dancer there for four years who sometimes left him for other men(like Roger and Mimi and Benny)and finally left him for another woman(like Maureen left Mark for Joanne).
Jonathan Larson wanted to transform the musical theater. To make it more modern like. He didn't like the fact that show music hadn't changed since the late 1940's. It was depressing that a lot of music still sounded like Oklahoma! in 1996. Jon had grown up listening to the Who, Billy Joel and Elton John, along with Sondheim. He wanted to make them one and the same thing. But after 7 years of writing musicals in the city he hadn't been able to convince anyone else that this was the right way to go. That was until he hit on RENT
There was a man named Billy Aronson who wanted to write a musical updating La Boheme. He wanted it to be about people like himself...Struggling to make art under lousy conditions. Some people suggested Jon to help him. The two men met a few times in 1989. Jonathan came up with the title. Billy wanted to make the show about his friends yet Jon wanted to make it about his. In the end Jon won. In 1991 he called Billy and asked if he could make RENT his own. Billy said yes.
In 1996, after years of fixing the script with help from people like Jim Nicola, Jeffrey Seller, Kevin McCollum, Allan S. Gordon, Michael Greif, Stephen Sondheim, and Lynn Thomson, Jon finally had a script that would make RENT one of the best shows ever. The New York Times got wind that a rock musical based on La Boheme was going to premiere on the 100th anniversary of the original La Boheme. No one had known this;It was a simple fluke.
A week before RENT's first preview at New York theater Workshop, Jon felt the first thump of the aortic aneurysm(believed to have been caused by Marfan Syndrome) that would carry him away. When that happened he was laughing...on the inside. The director Michael Grief and the cast were rehearsing the song "What You Own". A song with lyrics about dying at the end of the millennium. Jon collapsed at the back of the theater and asked for an ambulance. He told his friends that he couldn't believe that the last song he would hear was his own song about dying. He had eaten a turkey burger and the doctors diagnosed it as food poisoning and pumped his stomach. A few days later, after another incident, the doctors at a second hospital said Jon had the flu. On the night of the final dress rehearsal Jon was sick with a sore chest and a fever, but he took a taxi to Fourth Street, watched the show and sat for his interviews with Times. The last thing Michael and Jim remember saying to Jon was to take it easy and sleep well. That they would see him and Lynn in the morning. Jonathan went home, put on some water for tea...and died. His roommate found him on the floor in the kitchen beside his coat. Jon was 35 years old. It happened 10 days before his 36th birthday.
Jon's friends had to go to his old loft to clean out the place. His oldest, best loved girlfriend found Jon's diary that he kept during his last years of college. It said, "When I die, whenever and wherever that may be, I wish to be cremated, and I want my ashes to be thrown to the sunset with music and dancing and crying."
Thank you Jonathan Larson. You were a great and talented man. May you Rest in Peace.