Review: Tick, tick… Boom!

Downpour stopped play. Not rain, not cricket, but a burst water main and the performance of Jonathan Larson’s semi-autobiographical 1990 musical (adapted for film by Netflix in 2021). About two-thirds of the way through the action, a stage manager enters from the wings. Uh-oh.

The event is unfortunate but the timing neat. Aspiring radical musical theatre writer Jon is just about to present a public workshop of what he hopes will be his breakthrough work, the one that will stop the “tick, tick… boom!” sounding ever louder in his head as he approaches his 30th birthday. This panic-inducing noise marks time passing and dreams of fame and fortune imploding (Larson himself was approaching 30 when he wrote this work; his rock musical Rent won a Pulitzer prize in 1996, shortly after his death at the age of 35).

Already, it may be too late for Jon to save his relationship. Susan is leaving New York – and him – for a job teaching dance offering the prospect of stability. Should he take her advice and be like their friend Michael; swap artistic ambition for a steady career with a fat salary and follow her?

We have reached the moment of crux: will this workshop launch Jon on to Broadway? His agent has shown up, but… enter stage manager, exeunt performers. Kate Wasserberg, Theatr Clwyd’s artistic director, seeing in the first production of her inaugural season, steps forward: could the audience please leave. Somewhere in the building, water is cascading from a ceiling. The show is over.

Tick, tick… Boom! marks a crucial opening, also, for the theatre itself – the first show in the building after a three-year closure for redevelopment (set in motion under the theatre’s executive director and CEO Liam Evans-Ford, and now in its concluding stages). All through the construction, shows went on (tent structures taking a leading role), as did the company’s multiple offstage operations. These include delivery of around 30 workshops for young people; interactions with 74 schools; engagement with 3,000 young musicians; health and wellbeing programmes for 150 participants – and that’s just the weekly totals.

Such connectivity, core to the ethos of the company, is physically expressed in the regenerative designs by theatre specialist architects Haworth Tomkins Tompkins. Internal balconies open up areas traditionally hidden to the public gaze (huge set-building workshops, for instance, and costume-making studios, allowing youngsters, in particular, to discover the range of crafts that make theatre possible); family and workshop spaces give on to dedicated gardens; windows everywhere open on to views of surrounding hillsides and of the town below. Theatr Clywd is undoubtedly a theatre powerhouse, not just for Wales but for the whole of the UK. Tonight’s applause, before we leave the auditorium, is not only for the production, but also for the theatre’s director and the entire company, in appreciation of their wider work.

Water pipe mended, and this peppy three-hander back on stage, I would happily return to discover how the story plays out. To see (and hear) again Ryan Owen’s desperate Jon and Christina Modestou’s at-the-end-of-her-tether Susan, getting more than their wires crossed in a landline telephone tiff (witty choreography by Lucy Cullingford); also the powerfully delivered solo by Tarik Frimpong’s more-than-meets-the-eye Michael – all backed by a rocking, above-stage four-piece band. If that doesn’t work out, a return to the theatre and another production should.

Tick, tick… Boom! is on at Theatr Clwyd, Mold until 28 June