Jennifer Ashley Tepper's The Jonathan Larson Project began performances Off-Broadway February 14, with opening night set for March 10 at the Orpheum Theatre. Meet the cast and creatives in the video above. 

Directed by John Simpkins, the project celebrates the dozens of seldom-heard songs, unfinished and unproduced musicals, and pop songs found in files and boxes when the visionary writer of Rent died suddenly at the age of 35 in 1996.

Conceived by Tepper, The Jonathan Larson Project contains songs from a variety of unproduced Larson shows—including 1984 and Superbia, as well as songs that were cut from Rent and tick, tick…BOOM!, songs written for theatrical revues and for the radio, and a variety of songs never publicly performed or recorded before The Jonathan Larson Project. The project was originally presented as a concert at 54 Below in Fall 2018 and was released as an album from Ghostlight Records in 2019.

"We are all fangirls at The Jonathan Larson Project," Tepper says. "Even people who are not fangirls like us are coming out of the woodwork [with] origin stories about Jonathan, or about each other, it's a good energy. It's a cliché when theatre people say this, but the new people feel like friends already. It feels like because we all have this uniting factor of Jonathan that we all bonded very quickly."

The production stars Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus, Andy Mientus, and Jason Tam, with Gilbert L. Bailey II and Jessie Hooker-Bailey as standbys. Both Marcus and Mientus have been with the project since its initial concert presentation. 

With such a variety of Larson songs, the cast is discovering layers to his work beyond the style of his hits. "One of the really exciting things about this show is that you can feel him...we have such a limited experience of what we think of as Jonathan," Chanler-Berat says. "But he was an artist, and he was trying a lot of different things out, and in this show you kind of get to hear him pushing the boundaries of his artistry."

"I think that everybody thinks that they are secretly going to be seeing Rent, whether or not they know it," adds Marcus. "There definitely are numbers—there's one that I think that he tried at one point to put into Rent—there's definitely numbers that are reminiscent of that. But I think what's so cool about this show is that Jonathan Larson wrote in so many different genres."

"Every song universe is so different from the last one," says Tam. "So I'm really excited for people to enter into all of these different universes, and witness this cool arc that we're crafting." 

WATCH: See the Cast of The Jonathan Larson Project Perform 'One of the These Days' and 'S.O.S.' 

The Jonathan Larson Project features music supervision and orchestrations by Charlie Rosen and co-arrangements by Rosen and Natalie Tenenbaum, choreography by Byron Easley, and music direction by Cynthia Meng. Casting is by The Telsey Office's Rachel Hoffman, with general management by Evan Bernardin Productions.

Visit TheJonathanLarsonProject.com.