Sondheim mentored Jonathan Larson, the creator of Rent

Person: Stephen Sondheim
Lived: 1930–2021
Field: Musical Theater
From: American

The story

Sondheim often said he loved passing on what Oscar Hammerstein had passed on to him. He explained that if a young composer wrote to him and the work interested him at all, he would always meet them. One of those young writers was Jonathan Larson, born in 1960 to a family of Russian-Jewish origin in Mount Vernon, New York, who counted Sondheim among his greatest musical influences.

Sondheim's encouragement mattered from the start. It was Sondheim who persuaded him to concentrate on composing rather than acting. Larson's first major project was Superbia, a futuristic musical that grew out of a planned adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sondheim attended a workshop and encouraged him, judging that Larson was still finding his voice but already had one. Over the years Larson wrote to Sondheim about his musicals and took his criticism seriously.

The relationship became part of Larson's autobiographical show Tick, Tick... Boom!, in which a voicemail from Sondheim is played, apologising for leaving early and saying he wanted to meet. Sondheim later gave Larson notes throughout the writing of Rent, a rock musical that reset Puccini's La Bohème among young artists in New York's East Village during the AIDS epidemic. He praised Larson as one of the few composers trying to blend contemporary pop with theatre music, and said Larson understood instinctively how to use music to tell a story.

Larson died suddenly on 25 January 1996, the day of Rent's first off-Broadway preview, at the age of 35. The show moved to Broadway that April, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and three Tony Awards for Larson, and ran until 2008, becoming one of the longest-running productions in Broadway history.

The bond lasted beyond Larson's death. When Lin-Manuel Miranda, whom Sondheim had also advised on the songs that became Hamilton, filmed Tick, Tick... Boom! in 2021, Sondheim revised the text of his famous voicemail and recorded it himself. Larson's own legacy now supports new writers through the Jonathan Larson Grants, administered by the American Theatre Wing.

Why it matters

Sondheim's generosity with his time helped shape Rent and other important musicals of the next generation, and that spirit lives on in grants for emerging writers.