An artist’s agony finds expression in Bucks County Playhouse

As a seasoned Broadway producer of big shows including Avenue Q and In the Heights, Robyn Goodman has been in the business long enough to recognize the agony of the life of a talented artist, be it on the brink of catapulting into success, stardom, recognition. Or, of giving it all up for a weekly paycheck and a mortgage.

The fraught moment, full of consequences in the life of an actor, a director, a set designer, even a producer, forms the basis of Tick, Tick … Boom!, a semiautobiographical musical by Jonathan Larson playing June 23 through July 15 at the Bucks County Playhouse where Goodman is executive producer.

Goodman produced the off-Broadway debut of Tick, Tick … Boom in 2001, which is why it is so meaningful for her to bring it to New Hope. For her, mentoring young theater professionals, as she did with Larson, has been among her most satisfying experiences.

“You can tell who has the fire in their belly and who doesn’t,” she said.

Larson, who wrote Rent, had it. His talent was immediately obvious to Goodman when she met him in New York in the late 1980s. At the time, Larson was facing his own Tick, Tick … Boom! moment — the ticktock of life passing and the boom of something blowing up — either a dream or a career.

“He was approaching his 30th birthday,” Goodman recalled. “His best friend was going into marketing, and his girlfriend, a dancer, decided to go out of town.

“They both opted out of being New York City artists and [Larson] was tortured by it. He thought they were selling out. He felt he was losing them from the world of art, and he was going to be alone in this endeavor. He was working in a diner and was tortured by the question of ‘Should I do something else?’

“He was an artist and he wanted to feel it was OK,” Goodman said.

The two developed a friendship and sometimes met for dinner. He told her about a work he was developing called Boho Days, an early version of Tick, Tick … Boom!

Sitting at a piano, Larson performed a first reading for Goodman and a few others at a 1990 workshop at New York’s Second Stage Theater, which Goodman cofounded with Carole Rothman, who still runs it. “But nobody did Boho Days, because Jon wanted to play all the parts,” Goodman said.

Meanwhile, Larson went on to develop the Broadway smash hit Rent, another semiautobiographical play about what he and his artist friends were experiencing in New York in the 1980s, based loosely on Giacomo Puccini’s opera La bohème.

“I called him and said, ‘I’ve got two tickets to La bohème and we’re going,’” Goodman said.

She didn’t hear much of the opera because Larson “was whispering in my ear the whole time about how he was changing it into a modern show about all his friends in the East Village. It was so compelling. They were all struggling and there was AIDS, and so much was going on.

“He was just so brilliant,” she said. “He told me, ‘I’m going to bring rock and roll to Broadway.’”

Tragically, Larson died Jan. 25, 1996, the day before Rent’s first off-Broadway preview.

After his death, his friends and family asked Goodman to look at the various iterations of Boho Days and Tick, Tick … Boom! and see if they could be staged, she recalled.

She turned to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn who fashioned Larson’s work — a rock monologue — into its current three-actor play version.

Andy Mientus stars as Jonathan, Krystina Alabado is Susan, and Noah J. Ricketts plays the best friend, all directed by Eric Rosen.

“Tick, Tick … Boom!, June 23 through July 15 at the Bucks County Playhouse, 70 S. Main St., New Hope, 215-862-2121 or bcptheater.org.

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