Boca Raton native and theater historian Jennifer Tepper has Broadway stories and musical facts for days. Growing up, she was always interested in the collision of past and present when it comes to musicals and theater, something that is palpable in her work such as the Jonathan Larson Project and as a theater historian for Tick Tick Boom the movie.
Tepper’s love for Jonathan Larson’s work goes back to 1994 and 2001 when Rent and Tick Tick Boom were first released. Eventually, The Jonathan Larson Project began as a lobby concert put together by Tepper for City Center Encores’ Off Center program and it featured 5 lesser known Larson songs. This led to Jennifer’s idea of a longer piece composed of Jonathan Larson’s cut songs from shows, songs that had never been heard before or recorded.
She spent years doing research at the Library of Congress in Washington DC where Larson’s collection of tapes, notebooks and recordings were donated by his family.
The most surprising discovery was the amount of work he had created that nobody knew from standalone projects to pop hits Larson had written for the radio.
“It was like being a cave explorer. I felt like I was exploring new land. I kept finding incredible songs projects that hadn’t been produced…and really getting excited about them turning into a song cycle Jonathan may have put together of his own music similar to Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a new world,” she said.
She collaborated with two time Tony award winner Charlie Rosen to turn the songs often only existing as a primitive tape recording from the 80s of Larson banging on a keyboard in his bedroom into a 5 person song cycle played as a concert at 54 Below, and then recorded it as a cast album. Eventually she would love for the Jonathan Larson Project to exist in a format that everyone could perform as a show in their high school or community.
Rhapsody is a favorite for Tepper from the cast recording. It was a piece Larson recorded himself on the keyboard in the early 80s which sounded the equivalent of an amazing song idea recorded in a voice memo on their phone and never wrote the lyrics. That was where the music department Charlie Rosen and music director Natalie Tenenbaum came into action as well as the cast
“(Rhapsody)sang amazingly by Nick Blaemire on the cast recording. You can really feel Jonathan’s presence, personality, and his dreams coming through that song and until the JLP it was one track on a 14 track tape of more than 100 tapes in a box, “ she said.
She was brought on board Tick Tick Boom the movie by Lin Manuel Miranda as a historian consultant. Miranda was familiar with the Jonathan Larson Project in its first version as a lobby concert and had also starred in City Center’s production of Tick Tick Boom as Larson. Tepper worked on giving historical accuracy to characters, to songs, and situations for the movie.
“He would ask me questions like what would Jonathan be writing in this scene. I got to sit in the room with a number of the actors and tell them more about the real people who their characters were based on,” she said.
Tepper has also written four volumes of Untold Stories of Broadway which is her passion project. She authored each volume as an exploration into the Broadway theaters themselves via 300+ interviews of actors, producers, dressers, ushers, and door people.
She started writing the books in 2013 because she was inspired by her experiences working in Broadway theaters such as the Lyceum with title of show the musical. When she was backstage at a Broadway theater it was exciting to see who else had used the dressing room in the past.
“It was so thrilling to be part of history through being in the physical place of a Broadway theater,” she said.
As for which interview left her star struck, there were many. One she remembered due to the recent Tony Awards was talking with actor Christian Borle on a rock in Central Park. For the first book she did 200 interviews and has subsequently added 30 new interviews for each book since then which meant 10 interviews in one week. A lot of interviews were done at restaurants in the theater district that are no longer there or in backstage dressing rooms of shows that are now closed.
“I would be rushing from Central Park to the Heights to Brooklyn. The color of the interview was changed by the location. The in person NYC of it all was really thrilling. The experience of doing the interview became part of the book in a way I didn’t expect,” she said.
Tepper attended NYU’s Tisch and majored in Dramatic Writing. However, there wasn’t really a major that accommodated all the things she wanted to do: historian, producer, theater maker/ administration. Therefore, she ended up creating a lot of her education through producing shows on campus, finding her own internships, reading books she assigned herself, going to see shows, and taking notes.
Her first internship was with the York Theater Off Broadway who perform underappreciated musicals of the past which was a particular interest of hers. She then interned with Rodgers and Hammerstein where she learned the ropes of licensing musicals and promoting musicals to different markets from schools to regional theaters. Her third internship was with the people who created title of show the musical.
During that internship, she attended opening night of In the Heights on Broadway and it was the way she'd imagined opening nights to be like. She remembers people climbing on tables to read the reviews, dancing together, and overall it being an exciting and magical night.
"I remember standing in line for the bathroom next to Sheri Renee Scott, watching Brian Darcy James get his coat back at coat check and chatting with him. Just feeling these small encounters and being there with the cast of title of show that I was part of the Broadway community in a way that I had never felt until that time," she said.
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