How Lin-Manuel Miranda Resurrected an Unfinished One-Man Show as a Hollywood Spectacle

"[He] genuinely believes that anything is possible,” said Andrew Garfield of Lin-Manuel Miranda. “It’s contagious.” (Photo Credit Macall Polay / Netflix)

Andrew Garfield was exhausted and upset. It had been weeks since Lin-Manuel Miranda pitched him on starring in a musical and invited him to a workshop of the still-being-written script — an unconventional step for any screen project but a highly informative tool for theatermakers like Miranda. But it was scheduled for the day after Garfield closed Broadway’s “Angels in America,” in which he played the tormented lead, and the role left him desperate to rest and recover.

“Perfect, so that means you’re available,” Miranda excitedly told Garfield. “You don’t have to sing if you’re too tired or nervous. We’ll just read through it together and see how it goes.”

Reluctantly, Garfield agreed to participate, and sat down with a handful of Miranda’s actor friends in a back office at the United Palace in New York’s Washington Heights.

“Two hours in, I’m having the time of my life in what was essentially a healing musical theater sound bath,” recalled Garfield, who, with Miranda’s gentle guidance, was starting to sing by the end of the weeklong workshop. Two more were held before filming began, which allowed Garfield and the other actors to establish a trust in the material, in each other and in Miranda.

“We felt like we were all in really great hands, which isn’t hard to feel because he is who he is,” said Garfield of Miranda. “Lin is an elemental force who doesn’t seem to need to sleep, who has this gleeful urgency when it comes to something he loves and who genuinely believes that anything is possible. It’s contagious.”

These same descriptors can be applied to the project’s author and main character: Jonathan Larson who, before creating the groundbreaking show “Rent,” spent the early 1990s developing and performing a solo work that became known as “Tick, Tick … Boom!” The semiautobiographical rock monologue is about a composer-lyricist who aims to take the industry by storm with what he believes to be a musical masterpiece.

“For anybody who is working toward something, there are those moments where you’re supremely confident, and then the next moment, you’re just absolutely full of despair and doubt of whether you’re ever going to be understood,” said Julie Larson, Jonathan’s sister. “And sometimes you don’t realize how your passionate, single-minded focus on a goal is impacting the people around you, and stopping you from seeing what’s really important.”

At first glance, “Tick, Tick … Boom!” does not have the explicit makings of a successful movie musical: Its source material is an unfinished one-man show that, after Larson’s tragic death in 1995, was reconfigured into a three-actor production; its main character is a charismatic but arguably self-obsessed creator navigating a niche field. Also, Miranda had never directed a major movie, and Garfield, who portrays Larson, had never sung in public before that first workshop.

But Miranda, also a musical visionary with a steadfast resolve, had asserted for years that a “Tick, Tick … Boom!” adaptation is “the only film I already knew how to make,” he told The Times. Currently in theaters and launching Friday on Netflix, the result “feels refreshingly intimate and specific, idealistic but rarely naive, and grounded in a way that gives an unexpected lift to its flights of fancy,” according to Times film critic Justin Chang. “Miranda’s talent for putting on a show has never been in doubt, but it takes a subtler dimension of talent to make this ostensibly small one feel big.”

This authentic expansion is achieved largely because of an unabashed embrace of the real Larson, who was inherently theatrical. His friends and family describe him as exuberant and generous, spontaneously making up songs about whatever was in a room and spending what money he had on celebrating his loved ones. His joie de vivre was matched by his mission to create a notable work of art. If only producers would discover his greatness at his upcoming presentation, conveniently scheduled for his 30th birthday.

“He believed in his own talent, but he had this profound terror that no one was ever going to pay attention,” said screenwriter Steven Levenson.

“Story-wise, it made sense to show the mind of this guy who is extravagant and spectacular but also frenetic and filled with anxiety and worst-case scenarios. Am I spending my time the way I’m supposed to? What if this thing that I’ve spent the past eight years writing is all just a waste? If another door gets slammed in my face, do I keep going or do I finally listen to all the signs and do something else?”

Miranda, now 41 years old, has asked himself these very questions for decades, especially while encountering Larson’s work. On his 17th birthday, he saw “Rent,” a show that directly inspired “In the Heights.” Watching “Tick, Tick … Boom!” in college clarified his purpose to pursue theatermaking professionally.

His performance in the 2014 City Center Encores! production of the show caught the attention of producer Julie Oh, who immediately pursued its film rights. “No one understands the themes of this story better than Lin does because he has lived it,” said Oh of Miranda.

And of course, Miranda — who also penned songs for Disney’s “Moana,” “Encanto” and the upcoming live-action “The Little Mermaid” as well as Sony’s “Vivo” — had a firm grasp on the interiority of trying to compose a song, and the irreplicable satisfaction of finally having written one.

“He could be a real pain in the ass because he was impatient and frustrated,” said Miranda of Larson. “But when he was teaching songs to actors and rehearsing and performing, it was like seeing a fish go back into the water, because he was doing what he was put on this earth to do. I understand that. I’m lucky enough to get to do this for a living, but I know I’d be writing songs no matter what, because it’s my calling.”

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