Like Friends with added songs, or Company for the slacker generation, Jonathan Larson's autobiographical chamber musical about being a starving artist living in New York's SoHo in 1990 is charming, and not half so cloying as the navel-gazing scenario might suggest.
Jonathan is a struggling composer, hoping to get his first musical on to Broadway and conscious that time is running out as he approaches his 30th birthday. His best friend Michael has already given up the fight to be an actor and has the prizes - a brand new apartment and a flashy BMW - that come with a flourishing career in marketing. Jonathan's dancer girlfriend is tired of starving in a garret, too, and longs for New England and a dishwasher. But will Jonathan sell out?
I think we all know the answer. Larson himself, of course, carried on the fight to be recognised for his talent, eventually penning Rent which opened on Broadway in 1996 just a few days after he died unexpectedly of an aortic aneurysm. He was 35.
It has always been difficult to separate Rent from its creator's death, but Tick Tick Boom! confirms that Larson was a major talent. The show wears its heart a little too obviously on its sleeve. But it has a wry humour and an ability to send up itself and New York culture. There is a wonderful scene when Jonathan spends a day at a marketing company and comes up with a name for a fat-free cooking oil: chubstitute.
Add to that some very hummable tunes, a clutch of witty ditties and the personable presence of Neil Patrick Harris, who makes Jonathan seem attractively self-effacing rather than self-regarding, and you have something to make your heart go tick, tick, boom with pleasure.
· Until September 3. Box office: 020-7907 7060.
