Rarely Heard Jonathan Larson Works Will Be Performed at 54 Below

NEW YORK — Jonathan Larson finished just two full musicals before his death at age 35 in 1996. But he left behind a vast collection of song demos, stray lyrics and unfinished ideas. Some of those rarely heard songs will be brought together in a concert called “The Jonathan Larson Project,” coming to Feinstein’s/54 Below in October.

The project will run Oct. 9-14 and feature lightly staged performances of roughly 18 songs from across Larson’s life, including cut songs from his musicals “Rent” and “Tick, Tick ... Boom!” The five-person cast will include Nick Blaemire and George Salazar, who recently starred together in an off-Broadway production of “Tick, Tick ... Boom!”

The project is being directed by Jennifer Ashley Tepper, a theater historian and the creative director at Feinstein’s/54 Below. To select the songs for this performance, she spent hours combing through his tapes, notebooks and floppy disks at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. She received permission from the Larson family to stage the songs; she bounced ideas off his sister, Julie, as well as some of Larson’s collaborators, including his former roommate Jonathan Burkhart and the actor Roger Bart.

“How I’ve been thinking of the project is the song cycle that he never put on but that he would have,” Tepper said in a phone interview. “The song cycle is a lot about love and New York and politics.”

Tepper said many of the songs are surprisingly relevant to today’s political landscape. Material from his unfinished adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984” will be performed, as well as a song called “White Male World.”

“He was so ahead of his time in embracing stories with people of all races and sexualities,” she said. “He wrote very well for women. A lot of these songs reflect that just as well as ‘Rent’ reflects that.”

Tepper hopes that the song cycle will broaden the composer’s canon beyond his two prominent works. “Sometimes I had leave the library to take a walk — just hearing him playing these songs in his empty apartment for no one,” she said. “One of my priorities is to make this part of the legacy that already exists.”