Stephen Peirick, director of Take Two Production’s current staging of Jonathan Larson’s Tick, Tick… Boom!, has done a terrific job of keeping some semblance of life stirring on stage during those long monologues. He’s helped by co-choreographer Stefanie Kluba. Between them, they manage to keep the cast alive and moving in interesting and significant ways. The lively and evocative work of music director Joseph Schoen also helps. Peirick also designed the set, several vertical stacks of black plastic storage boxes with lights both white and red attached to them, making, I thought, a kind of Manhattan skyline as seen from the Lower East Side where our hero lives. Peirick’s lighting on them and elsewhere adjusts with the times. The costumes, I assume, could have come from the cast’s own closets or from their parents’, anything that said 1990.

The cast is strong. Peirick did not follow the tradition of the earliest off-off productions of this piece with only three actors and lots of doubling. Jon, the main character, intends to be the great American musical theatre creator by the time he is thirty, and that’s only a few days away – “tick, tick” the clock is counting down to thirty – “BOOM!,” and no New York Times article extolling Stephen Sondheim’s successor. 

But he does have a new musical opening somewhere “off-” in a day or two. That is a worry. So is his girlfriend Susan, a dancer who has been offered a place with the Jacob’s Pillow company in New England, and he can write in lovely and quiet New England, and she’s ready to settle down with some more permanent family arrangement, and it is a great opportunity for her. And his best friend Michael gave up on becoming an actor, sold out to Mad Avenue, drives a very nice car, and is establishing a family somewhere that’s green. He keeps showing up to demonstrate how nice it can be.

Clayton Humburg finds ways to give real anguish to Jon in his long monologues of doubt and complaint, longer than they should be in a musical that never quite finds a way to become more than a musical. (Check with the creator of Rent.) Do what Humburg can, those monologues do get depressing, which makes for a long evening. Katie Orr brightens things as girlfriend Susan and others. Jacob Schmidt as his former-actor friend Michael tries to brighten things. Brittany Kohl Hester as a fellow worker in the lunch counter that is Jon’s day job tries to help over the hump of Susan’s leaving. Ryan Farmer plays Jon’s father, often on the phone, very kindly asking how he is doing, suggesting he join his father in the Law. And all the cast members form a kind of very informal chorus at times.         

Now we have seen Larson’s other musical. Had Rent not been a huge success, I think that we would be seeing far fewer productions of Tick, Tick… Boom! But I thank Take Two Productions for letting us make up our own minds about this piece, and for treating it well.

—Bob Wilcox

Photo by Dani Mann
From the left, Katie Orr, Brittany Kohl Hester, Clayton Humburg, Ryan Farmer, and Jacob Schmidt.