Jonathan Larson wrote “Rent.” Lots of people know that. But in the years before that 1996 show — and his untimely death, at 35, hours before its first preview — he wrote dozens of other songs, most of which have never been heard by the general public.
That’s about to change.
The New York club Feinstein’s/54 Below is holding 12 concerts, starting Oct. 9, at which about 30 little-known Larson compositions will be performed, some by his collaborators, and some by artists who encountered his work only after his death.
The concert is a passion project for Jennifer Ashley Tepper, the club’s creative and programming director and a longtime fan of Larson’s work — her bat mitzvah sign-in board depicted her dressed as Mimi, popping out of a pile of “Rent” playbills. She dived into his archives at the Library of Congress, listening to hours of recordings and sifting through boxes of documents to reconstruct his catalog.
Larson wrote about 200 songs over 18 years, starting when he was in college. They were for unproduced musicals, workshops and benefits; there were pop songs, political songs, and songs cut from his two posthumously produced musicals, “Rent” and “Tick, Tick … Boom!”
Many are about being a struggling artist in New York. Few of the songs existed in written form, so the producers of the “Jonathan Larson Project,” as the 54 Below concerts are being titled, had to transcribe and orchestrate them from recordings; Ms. Tepper is presenting them as a song cycle.
The project is being done with the cooperation of Larson’s family — his sister and his parents, who oversee his work through a company called Skeeziks (that was his father’s nickname for him, after a character in “Gasoline Alley”).
“It’s helpful for young up-and-coming composers to see that ‘Rent’ didn’t just happen,” said his sister, Julie, who recalled hearing some of the songs on cassettes he circulated to family members. “A whole lot of other stuff happened before, leading up to it.”
Nick Blaemire, one of the singers who will perform at the concerts, said it had been reassuring to realize that Larson (who posthumously won two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for “Rent”) had grappled with many of the same issues facing today’s creative class.
“These songs help us as artists feel less alone in the challenge of being an artist,” said Mr. Blaemire, who starred in a 2016 revival of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” “This guy is articulating nuances about what it takes to live in this business.”
Seventeen songs will be performed at each show, with one or two more depending on the guest performer. Here are descriptions of four largely unheard Larson numbers, and why they were chosen.
‘La Di Da Rap’
We all should be drinking
To Abraham Lincoln
And get stinking drunk in his name
It’s a good thing he’s dead
’Cause he’d cry his eyes red
Hang his head
If he saw this campaign
This song was written in 1989 for a proposed National Lampoon revue, with contributions from multiple writers, about presidential politics. The show was announced with plans for regional theater productions followed by Broadway — “It’s exciting bringing the National Lampoon to Broadway,” the producer Nelle Nugent said at the time — but it never got off the ground.
“La Di Da Rap” is noteworthy in part because it seems to foreshadow current events — it is about campaign strategy, and features the phrase “make America great,” which 27 years later appeared as part of Donald J. Trump’s campaign slogan.
“The song integrates rap in a way that Broadway musicals were not yet doing,” Ms. Tepper said, “so in that way, it was certainly a precursor to the way Jonathan integrated so many modern music genres into ‘Rent.’’’
‘White Male World’
It’s just another day
In the white male world
Let’s cut down a jungle
Let’s go start a war
Let’s go rape a coed
What a lovely thing to do
Another eerily prescient song, this 1991 number is Larson’s look at what we might now call white male privilege, written for a show called “Skirting the Issues.” The show, directed by Maggie Lally and created by a 10-person ensemble with additional music by Larson, had a brief Off Off Broadway run; New York magazine summarized it as “the post-Barbie generation takes aim at everything, from A-Z.”
“It is Jonathan taking aim at toxic white male masculinity, in a satirical way,” Ms. Tepper said. “It will be sung by the two women in the show.”
‘Hosing the Furniture’
This house is a reflection of me —
Modern, graceful, easy, simple … synthetic
So free
In everything I see — my reflection
Do I really look so simply pathetic?
Larson wrote this song for a proposed but never fully staged 1989 revue called “Sitting on the Edge of the Future,” which would have featured various writers creating pieces in response to the 1939 World’s Fair, which was full of exhibitions that asked audiences to imagine what the world would be like going forward.
“We wanted to make sure some of my family’s personal favorites were included, because they’re important to us,” said Ms. Larson, who plans to attend all of the concerts, joined by a rotating group of family and friends. “They asked some established composers and some young unknown and up-and-coming composers, and each was given a theme to write about. My brother’s was the 1950s housewife.”
In his whimsical yet sad song, a woman uses a hose to wash a house whose contents are made of plastic. She sings playfully to her furniture, and herself, as she cleans and cooks in anticipation of her husband’s return home from work, but she is also besieged by doubts, about her looks and her marriage and her life.
‘Rhapsody’
Sky’s not free
River’s not free
I’m not free
Life’s not free
In the city
Larson was just 23 when he wrote this song, in 1983, about struggling in New York City. The title is a pointed allusion to Gershwin — the song closes with the lyric “I love ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ too — It’s just that he was rich when he wrote it. And only the rats, the roaches, the rubble and the rich men are free in the city.”
“These songs are raw — they’re like drunk demos at 3 a.m. — and this one goes on for six and a half minutes,” Mr. Blaemire said. “When I first heard it, I thought, ‘This is a mess. We can’t put this up.’ But in working on it I realized there’s not a word wasted. It’s a song about living in New York City, and he’s taking his power back by writing this massive Gershwinian spin on what he’s going through.’”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Beyond ‘Rent,’ Tunes Awaiting Their Star Turn. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
