Jonathan Larson died hours before the premiere of Rent, his 1990s musical about a group of friends navigating poverty and addiction, love and AIDS. The playwright, only 35, never witnessed the success that followed. But in his apartment, flashes of genius remained in the form of scripts, journals, and cassette tapes, hundreds of them. These have now been collaged into The Jonathan Larson Project, a musical drawn from the posthumously discovered writings. “We haven’t changed a word,” says Jennifer Ashley Tepper, who conceived the show. “The idea is not to fix something he wrote or make it relevant, it’s to do what he wrote and to honor it.” Featuring cut songs from Rent and Tick, Tick … BOOM!, the show follows a young, struggling artist searching for his voice. Adam Chanler-Berat and Taylor Iman Jones star. John Simpkins directs. —Jeanne Malle