Tick, Tick... BOOM!
Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1
The agony of turning 30 might seem, theatrically speaking, like pretty small beer, but Tick, Tick... BOOM! manages to be charming and funny on the topic, and poignant, even if you didn't know that its creator, New York composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson of Rent renown, would not make it to 40. (Larson died in 1996 of an aortic aneurysm just before his 36th birthday). Premiered posthumously off-Broadway, Tick, Tick... BOOM! is a smaller-scale piece than Rent and a sweeter one and it boasts a score to suggest further that Larson's awful death took a musical theatre maverick from our midst. The show deals with a struggling composer called Jonathan, though it would be wrong to assume that Larson's book (tweaked after its creator's death by playwright David Auburn) is mere undigested autobiography. Instead, Tick, Tick... turns the artistic travails of one man into an easily identifiable story of aesthetic ambition played out against the ticking clock we all hear in our heads.
· Until 3 September. Tickets: 020 7907 7060
