So when Miranda began to formulate his version of Larson’s “Sunday,” he imagined a paean to the musical theater that inspired Larson and that Larson inspired. Larson’s version swaps the Island of La Grande Jatte for the legendary Moondance Diner (a Manhattan haunt, since closed down, where Larson had once worked as a waiter), subbing in himself for Seurat. In the original “Sunday,” Seurat guides his subjects in the park into a perfect composition as the chorus sings in harmony. The 1984 musical followed French painter Georges Seurat as he worked on his seminal pointillist painting A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, of park-goers on the banks of the River Seine.

His song “Sunday” began as an admiring parody of another “Sunday,” the Act One closer from Sondheim’s Pulitzer-winning Sunday in the Park with George. Just as Miranda looked up to Larson, Larson idolized Sondheim. He played Larson’s character, alongside Leslie Odom Jr. In 2014, Miranda-who has long been inspired by Larson’s legacy-starred in a special two-week run of the show in between the workshop and Off-Broadway debut of Hamilton.

It was posthumously adapted into a full-fledged musical (with assists from Larson’s college friend Victoria Leacock Hoffman, a producer, and Tony-winning playwright David Auburn) and several companies have performed it Off-Broadway since. He’d also written Tick, Tick…Boom! as an autobiographical story about trying to break into Broadway, and performed it as a one-man “rock monologue” in the same years he was developing Rent. Larson died suddenly in 1996, on the morning of Rent’s first Off-Broadway preview show, and was never able to witness its enduring success. Directed by Broadway game changer Miranda and adapted from a musical by Rent composer, lyricist, and writer Jonathan Larson, who was in turn inspired by musical legend Stephen Sondheim, the number features cameos by over a dozen Broadway icons in a fantastical sequence packed with enough Easter eggs to keep theater nerds pausing and rewinding for weeks. The song “Sunday,” a showstopper that comes early in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s feature directorial debut, Tick, Tick…Boom!, lasts only a few minutes, but it packs in four decades of Broadway history.

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