In tick, tick...BOOM!, Jonathan Larson's struggle to become a suc-cessful rock composer and lyricist comes to life with comedy, song and heartfelt passion. Larson, of course, was the creator of the hit Broad-way musical Rent. 

His tragic death of an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm in 1996, three days before the review performances of Rent at the New York Theatre Workshop and 10 days before his 36th birthday, makes this energetic and intensely personal musical all the more poignant to admirers of his life and work. 
Originally written and performed as a dramatic monologue based on his life, Larson conceived of tick, tick...BOOM! around the same time he was creating Rent. After his untimely death, his producing partner Victoria Leacock brought David Auburn, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning play Proof, aboard as script consultant to reconfigure the piece. He restructured the monologue into a seamless three actor musical. Watching the current incarnation, it's hard to imagine the piece in its original form because it works so well as an ensemble piece. 
As the show opens, Jonathan, Larson's alter ego, composes music in his tiny, grungy apartment located at the edge of SoHo in 1990. It is a few weeks before his 30th birthday and pressures from his own ambi-tions, his girlfriend Susan and his best friend and roommate Michael are getting to him. Should he sell out his dreams of becoming a composer and join the corporate rat race on Madison Avenue as Michael has? 
Should he commit to Susan and move with her to Cape Cod as she wishes? He's tired of waiting tables to pay the rent, a job he's done for the past six years, and he hopes that the musical he's been working on for the past five years, Superbia, which is in rehearsals and about to be workshopped, will be his big break.