by Douglas Feiden
New York Now
June 2, 1999

Ask Jonathan Larson's father what he remembers most about his son's short, fantastic life and the word "struggle" comes to mind. "Jonathan had to work like a dog to keep body and soul together to become a successful composer," Al Larson recalls of the wunderkind who wrote the smash-hit musical "Rent."

"Paying the rent and putting food on the table were daily struggles."

Now, more than three years after Jonathan Larson's death at the age of 35, the Larson family is turning its attention to striving artists that their son epitomized.

Call it Larson's Legacy.

Tapping into a modest foundation fueled by the profits from "Rent," the family is providing grants to those hoping to make it in musical theater.

Ranging from $2,500 to $10,000, the grants allow the next generation of theatrical talent — composers, lyricists and librettists — to devote themselves to their craft.

"We're in business to help starving artists," says the 73-year-old Larson. "We figure there's a lot of theatrical people in the same rocky boat that Jonathan used to be in."The grants have meant much-needed help — with no strings attached — for people like Kirsten Childs and Ricky Ian Gordon, two fledgling composers who are using the money to buy groceries and pay bills while writing audacious musicals.

Jonathan Larson's story is the stuff of theatrical legend. A New York native, he waited tables for 10 years at SoHo's Moondance Diner while wrestling with "Rent," his modern rock opera based on "La Bohème" and set in the East Village.

On Jan. 25, 1996, the night before "Rent" was set to open Off-Broadway, Larson watched a final dress rehearsal, headed home to his Village apartment and died of an aortic aneurysm.

"Rent" took Broadway by storm when it opened in April 1996, winning a Tony for Best Musical and a Pulitzer Prize. The show grossed $78 million in ticket sales at the Nederlander Theater over three years, and it became an international phenomenon with more than a dozen touring companies grossing $280 million in English-speaking countries alone.

With profits from the show rolling in, the Larson family — his father, mother Nanette and sister Julie Larson McCollum — set up a foundation and hired Nancy Diekmann to run it. She had nurtured "Rent" for more than four years as chief of the New York Theater Workshop.

With little fanfare, the foundation handed out $10,000 in 1997 and then $20,000 in 1998. By February of this year, it gave out $50,000.

Al Larson hopes to increase grants to the $75,000 to $100,000 range next year. And he says the foundation's goal is to build a self-sustaining endowment of more than $5 million over the next three to five years.

"We're looking to fund people with the talent, the vision and the staying power to help chart the future of the American musical theater," says Diekmann.

These are four artists who have received grants from the foundation.

RICKY IAN GORDON

Ever since he started playing piano at the age of 5, Gordon knew he wanted to have a career in the musical theater.

Today, at 42, he's a full-time composer for opera, dance, film, theater and the concert hall. But things haven't been easy for the Island Park, L.I., native.

"The economics of being a composer means living hand to mouth, borrowing money from friends, never having medical insurance, surviving on tiny grants and never being paid to write or rehearse," says Gordon.

The $5,000 he received allowed him to hire an extra musician for "Dream True," his musical about two lifelong friends that had a five-week run at Off-Broadway's Vineyard Theater. It also allowed him to pay the rent.

The first tip-off of his creative bent came during a sixth grade show-and-tell project in which classmates displayed turtles, tropical fish and praying mantises — and he read the sheet music from Wagner's "Die Walkure."

When he launched his musical career, it didn't take off. He cleaned houses for 10 years, waited tables and worked in a natural-food store, before devoting himself to composing full-time.

He earned $15,000 to $20,000 last year with the help of grants and stipends — barely enough to pay the $1,300-a-month rent for his upper West Side apartment.

"Some weeks you have money, some weeks you don't, and there are times when it's absolutely terrifying," Gordon says. "But a grant like this enables you to believe in what you're doing and to keep on going."

SAM DAVIS

By day, Sam Davis is a cocktail pianist at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Times Square. By night, he dreams of making it big on Broadway.

Davis hopes the $2,500 he received from Larson will give him the time he needs to write a musical.

"It means I can play a little less cocktail piano and a little less rehearsal piano — and I won't have to jump quite as much every single time someone calls," he says.

A recent graduate of the University of Michigan School of Music, Davis wrote "Mina and Colossus," a musical about a romance between a poet and a boxer, and a version of the "Rumpelstiltskin" fable, which was performed last summer in the Catskills.

"He's a little green, a little unformed and his material hasn't quite fully evolved," said Barry Singer, who served as a judge in the awards selection. "But there's a real spark there, worthy of recognition, and it reminded me of the way Jonathan was at the very beginning."

The cash will help: Davis earned slightly over $10,000 last year in the eight months since he left school, and he and a roommate share the $750 tab for their apartment in Park Slope.

STEVEN LUTVAK

Steven Lutvak, 35, a composer-lyricist-cabaret singer who has appeared at the Algonquin and the Russian Tea Room, snared a $5,000 grant.

It bought him time to rework his musical, "Esmeralda," for a premiere in St. Louis next year, and to support his pop, rock and classical adaptation of playwright A.R. Gurney's "Wayside Motor Inn."

"Every hour of writing requires four hours of preparation, so the grant provides a nice cushion of time and takes away a high level of anxiety," he says.

The Bronx-born Lutvak makes his living coaching Broadway actors in singing and song interpretation — at $75 to $85 an hour — and he'll now be able to take on fewer students, as he writes more of his own music.

"You can't wait for some producer to appear waving a magic wand like in the movies," he says.

KIRSTEN CHILDS

Kirsten Childs used to work as secretarial temp at an investment bank. Not anymore.

Thanks to a $10,000 grant from the foundation, she's now working on completing her musical "The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin."

"I have absolutely no money — and that's the standard living condition of the New York artist," Childs says. "But now, I don't have to worry how I'm going to live, eat or pay rent — only the work matters."

The money paid her rent and other bills — and gave her the freedom to pull off a successful three-week workshop of the musical last month at Playwrights Horizons.

"Bubbly" is the semi-autobiographical tale of a black woman who uses a "bubbly mask" to conceal the rage she feels as she comes of age amid the turmoil of 1960s Los Angeles.

"It was the worst quality tape ever submitted" Singer said of the recording Childs submitted to the award judges. "But it was the most original and irresistible music we had heard."