Larson’s version swaps the Island of La Grande Jatte for the legendary Moondance Diner (a Manhattan haunt, since closed down, where Larson had once worked as a waiter), subbing in himself for Seurat. In the original “Sunday,” Seurat guides his subjects in the park into a perfect composition as the chorus sings in harmony. The 1984 musical followed French painter Georges Seurat as he worked on his seminal pointillist painting A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, of park-goers on the banks of the River Seine. His song “Sunday” began as an admiring parody of another “Sunday,” the Act One closer from Sondheim’s Pulitzer-winning Sunday in the Park with George. Just as Miranda looked up to Larson, Larson idolized Sondheim. He played Larson’s character, alongside Leslie Odom Jr. In 2014, Miranda-who has long been inspired by Larson’s legacy-starred in a special two-week run of the show in between the workshop and Off-Broadway debut of Hamilton. It was posthumously adapted into a full-fledged musical (with assists from Larson’s college friend Victoria Leacock Hoffman, a producer, and Tony-winning playwright David Auburn) and several companies have performed it Off-Broadway since. He’d also written Tick, Tick…Boom! as an autobiographical story about trying to break into Broadway, and performed it as a one-man “rock monologue” in the same years he was developing Rent. Larson died suddenly in 1996, on the morning of Rent’s first Off-Broadway preview show, and was never able to witness its enduring success.
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Directed by Broadway game changer Miranda and adapted from a musical by Rent composer, lyricist, and writer Jonathan Larson, who was in turn inspired by musical legend Stephen Sondheim, the number features cameos by over a dozen Broadway icons in a fantastical sequence packed with enough Easter eggs to keep theater nerds pausing and rewinding for weeks. The song “Sunday,” a showstopper that comes early in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s feature directorial debut, Tick, Tick…Boom!, lasts only a few minutes, but it packs in four decades of Broadway history.