I'm already familiar with the evening, the afternoon, the morning,
I've measured my whole life with coffee spoons;
I was familiar with the sound of music coming from the distant room
The voice that gradually became lighter and finally disappeared,
But how dare I act rashly?
Love songs by J. Alfred Pruflock
T.S. Elliott
Published in the early twentieth century, Alfred Pruflock's Love Song, Eliot describes a sensitive and cowardly man who uses a coffee spoon as a measure of his life, allowing his life to slip away with the heat of the coffee and the alternating morning and dusk. At the end of the twentieth century, someone proposed a similar concept in the song:
How do you measure your life? With midnight or coffee?
The song is from the musical "Yoshiya Rental", and perhaps many people have heard its name. Different from Prufolk's hesitation and cowardice, every character in "Yoshiya Rental" is a person who grasps the moment and burns life, and the courage and enthusiasm they show on the stage have touched the hearts of countless audiences.
Whether you like Yoshiya Rental or not, you can't deny the great success it has been:
This play, which has been performed on Broadway for 10 years, has become the seventh longest-lived play, and is still one of the most classic rock musicals;
Its musical soundtrack, the most successful recording in three decades in the American musical theater industry;
In addition, the play has won four Tony Awards (including Best Musical, Best Musical Script, and Best Musical Original Music), six Theatre Society Awards (including Best Musical, Best Musical Screenplay, Best Music, and Best Lyrics), Best Musical At the New York Critics Organization Awards, New York Foreign Drama Critics Award (Off Broadway), and three Obies Awards.
Today we are going to introduce the creator of this legendary work, Jonathan Larson.
Jonathan Larson Written/Acted/Directed by Jonathan Larson
In 1996, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for "Yoshiya Rental". Larson's previous works include Superbia, Tick, Tick... BOOM! and "J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation" music. He also wrote music for Sesame Street. He also wrote and directed the children's video "Away We Go!" and wrote four of the songs.
01
Tick,Tick... boom!
Born in New York in 1960, Larson grew up in the performing arts, playing trumpets and trumpets, singing in the school choir, and taking piano lessons. He loves rock music, like Elton John, the Beatles... His love of music led him to study acting in college and began composing.
At that time, his life should have been very smooth. During his college years he received a four-year professional scholarship in acting and has also performed in many plays and musicals. After starting composition, he composed music for a small student work called "Cabaret Performance" and later scored the musical Libro de Buen Amor, composed by department chair Jacques Berdyck. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Larson participated in the Summer Stock Theater Program at augusta Barn Theater in Michigan as a pianist, for which he received a stake card for membership in the Actors' Rights Association.
But he soon lost such a smooth time. After graduation, he chose to focus on creating his own work. At the same time, he was reluctant to work in the business and preferred to leave time for documenting his creative ideas. For nine and a half years, Larson worked as a waiter in a restaurant on weekends and monday through Friday to create musicals. In the early days of his creation, he achieved some achievements, but the wealth brought by these achievements was not enough to make ends meet, so he had to continue to work as a restaurant waiter.
Between 1983 and 1990, Larson wrote the musical Superbia based on George Orwell's book 1984, but regrettably, the play was never fully produced on stage except for a few performances in the form of rock concerts in 1989. To express his disappointment with the frustration of creating Superbia, Larson completed the autobiographical rock musical Tick, Tick... Boom!）》。
The musical was later made into a film by his "fan" Lin-Manuel Miranda, also named After Countdown, and was released at the American Film Institute Film Festival on November 10, 2021. It was only after his death that he found his applause and brilliance, and Larson would never know. All he could know was that he was thirty years old and he had not yet succeeded.
In Countdown, he wrote this monologue: "I'm a composer, sorry, a 'young composer with a big future.'" At this age, I should have had children and a career, but in fact, I was tired and tired on this great future, and I was afraid that I had to stop moving forward. ”
In this semi-autobiographical rock monologue, he uses a playful tone to dissect the ambitions, struggles, beliefs, passions, desires and self-doubts of a young playwright and a New Yorker on stage, presenting the sad undertones of life in a comedic form.
02
RENT
In 1989, Jonathan Larson, a composer at the age of 29, met Billy Arenson, a playwright who wanted to make a modern version of Bohemian. So Larson began the creation of "Yoshiya Rental".
"Yoshiya Rental" tells the story of a group of "marginal people" who live in downtown New York. They are gays, addicts, AIDS patients, drag queens... They can't pay rent, they can't afford heating, they're not understood, they're discriminated against. Mark and Mimi met by borrowing a candle to keep them warm, and Collins and Angel were married by a robbery—even the first encounter was so embarrassing, chaotic, and undignified.
One of the main characters in the play repeatedly sings: "Will I lose my dignity?" Does anyone care? Will I wake up from this nightmare tomorrow? ”
He would not hear an answer, he was just a meagre "low-end population" living in New York, a "degenerate" in this society, a terminally ill dying man.
But who can pronounce judgment on life at will?
To fruits to no absolutes
Honor the fruits of the harvest, honor the present, the present without absolute truth
To Absolute- to choice
Respectfully, there is no constraint, to choose their own opportunities in life
To the Village Voice
Salute this country voice
To any passing fad
Respectful flashed a sudden flash of crazy thoughts
To being an us-for once-, instead of a them -
Honor ourselves, we become ourselves, not those who go with the flow
It's certainly a sad story of poor artists spending a Christmas Eve with no heat, no electricity, and only candles for warmth, and about to be evicted from their homes by their landlords because they can't afford to pay their rent; but it's another warm and bright story, with homeless people singing Christmas songs together, and people without a future singing "NO DAY BUT TODAY" repeatedly. It tells the story of strippers, homosexuals, addicts, AIDS... It speaks of the insignificant margins of society, and it speaks of love and freedom.
Jonathan died of a ruptured aortic tumor on January 25, 1996, the first day of rent's premiere.
"Jonathan, if you can hear, you've fulfilled every wish you've fulfilled, and that's not all. We continue to rehearse your work, and some people's lives have changed as a result. Someone is able to tell their own story because you told yours. Someone pursues a dream that is as great as yours. There are people who struggle and try to do what they only have to do their best. There are also people who want to try their best to find the right word to tell you, thank you, thank you, thank you. ”
- "A Journey to Find the Muse in a Race Against Time"