Easter Eggs You Missed In Tick, Tick... Boom!

"Tick, Tick... Boom!" is about a musical within a musical within a movie, and hanging over the entire film is the presence of a musical that, at the time the movie is set, hadn't been written yet. It's less confusing than we make it sound, we promise.

See, when legendary composer Jonathan Larson passed away in 1996, he never got to see the fruits of his labor. His musical "Rent" became a cultural phenomenon and won a Pulitzer Prize. But before "Rent," Larson wrote a dystopian rock musical called "Superbia," and even though it was awarded the Richard Rodgers Development Grant, nobody was willing to give it a full-scale production. So Larson created "Tick, Tick... Boom!," a one-person rock monologue about a playwright who spent eight years of his life working on a musical that never saw the light of day. Needless to say, it was a very autobiographical work. 

After Larson's death, "Tick, Tick... Boom!" was adapted as a three-person Off-Broadway show and then as a movie on Netflix that has critics exploding with praise. The film is Lin-Manuel Miranda's directorial debut and stars Andrew Garfield as Larson; all of its songs were written by the original Jonathan Larson. Miranda's film gives Larson a lot of love. In fact, it pays homage to all of the musical theater. "Tick, Tick... Boom!" contains a smorgasbord of Easter eggs that would give even Pixar and Marvel (the kings of Easter eggs) a run for their money.

In the opening scene of "Tick, Tick... Boom!" Jonathan Larson announces, "The date is January 26, 1990," just as Larson's musical "Rent" also begins by announcing an exact date. In fact, it even goes so far as to specify "Eastern Standard Time" — a clever satire of the way stories always seem to open with the date.

The events of "Tick, Tick... Boom!" happen in the week leading up to Larson's 30th birthday. According to Howard Ho, Miranda chose to set the film on this particular day for a reason: it's exactly six years before Larson's musical "Rent" got its first performance. Tragically, Larson died the morning before his musical debuted.

This isn't the only time the movie makes a sly reference to Larson's ticking clock. During the song "Swimming," Larson says, "Can I make it to 40?" which could be referring to the distance markers on the bottom of the swimming pool or to Larson's mortality because he never did make it to the age of 40. This moment only underscores that Larson needed to make the most of his time on earth.

See how many of Lin Manuel Miranda's friends and family you can spot in "Tick, Tick... Boom!" For starters, in the diner you'll see Phillipa Soo and Renee Elise Goldsberry, who played two Schuyler Sisters in "Hamilton." The colors of their outfits match the colors of their "Hamilton" costumes, and they even strike a pose that mirrors an iconic "Hamilton" pose. Meanwhile Chris Jackson (best known as Washington from "Hamilton") is sitting in the audience next to Sondheim during the final song (Lin once told Jackson, "Long as I got a job, you got a job.") Miranda also brought in several members of Freestyle Love Supreme, an improv hip-hop stage performance that Lin co-founded. For example, Chris "Shockwave" Sullivan and Andrew "Jelly Donut" Bancroft are disguised as doormen.

The director even managed to sneak in some family members. Lin's father, Luis Miranda Jr., sits behind the desk at Michael's new apartment, while Miranda's wife Vanessa Nadal plays a character named Deborah in a voicemail message. Plus, the director revealed in a tweet that he cast his elementary school music teacher, Barbara Ames, as young Larson's music teacher.

Last but not least, Miranda himself plays a cook at the Moondance Diner. Originally, Lin wasn't going to appear in the film at all. Instead, he wanted to give a cameo to two performers from "Into the Woods," he told Yahoo! News, since he thought it would be fitting to place the Baker and the Baker's Wife in the restaurant kitchen. But they weren't available, so Lin stepped in.

The "Sunday" scene in "Tick, Tick... Boom!" isn't the only one that's chock-full of celebrity cameos. For one, there's Ben Levi Ross in the role of Jonathan Larson's friend Freddy; previously he has been in productions of "Dear Evan Hansen," says Screenrant. 

Meanwhile, you'll notice that Michael's boyfriend in the final scene is Jelani Alladin, who played Kristoff from the Broadway version of "Frozen." Larson's parents in the film are both played by major Broadway figures: Danny Burstein from "Moulin Rouge" and Judy Kuhn from "Fun Home" (though she is better known as the singing voice of Disney's "Pocahontas"). Also, all the singers in Larson's workshop have been on Broadway before, including Janet Dacal from "In the Heights" and Kate Rockwell from "Bring It On" (both of which are projects Miranda worked on).

And let's not forget Andrew Garfield is no stranger to the theater. According to Playbill, he has performed revivals of the plays "Angels in America" and "Death of a Salesman."

Just when you thought "Tick, Tick... Boom!" ran out of celebrities to give cameos to, along comes the focus group scene. According to Buzzfeed, the characters in the focus group are all Broadway stars, including Laura Benanti ("Gypsy"), Micaela Diamond ("The Cher Show"), and Danielle Ferland (another performer from "Sunday in the Park with George.")

You'll notice that Laura Benanti's character wrote the word "Santa Fe" on the whiteboard, in reference to the song by the same title from "Rent." What's funny, though, is that the city "Santa Cruz” appears on the whiteboard, too, except it's spelled "Santa Cruize." You can tell that it was originally spelled "Santa Cruise," because there's a "Z" written on top of the "S." We bet that Larson called out the misspelling and then the lady tried to correct it — yet still spelled it wrong.

Finally, there's a really sneaky reference that's not just a celebrity cameo — it's a play on words, too. One focus group member is Utkarsh Ambudkar (aka UTK) from Freestyle Love Supreme. When brainstorming ideas for the marketing campaign, Utkarsh's character blurts out, "Sunrise." Conveniently, UTK improvised a rap for Freestyle Love Supreme based on the prompt "Sunrise," where he transformed the word into advice from two immigrant parents to their son: "Son, rise." Knowing Lin-Manuel Miranda, this can't be a coincidence.

"Play Game," a song in the style of a 90s music video, is set against the backdrop of Shubert Alley in the Theater District. Observant viewers will be rewarded by a treasure trove of hilarious (and surprisingly accurate) Broadway posters that make a cutting commentary on the 1990 Broadway scene.

Two posters criticize Broadway (or at least the Broadway of Larson's day) for hardly ever taking risks. One is called "Old Songs You Already Like," while another boasts the lengthy title, "A New Play, But It Has the Guy from That Television Show, So You'll Like It." While he's at it, Lin-Manuel Miranda throws a shade at movies that he feels didn't need a Broadway adaptation; there's a sign that says, "A Mediocre Movie, Now a Mediocre Musical." Also displayed on Shubert Alley is a promo for "Gypsy (Again)," which is clearly a reference to the Broadway musical that went through five different revivals. Other posters include "Matt Steinberg's White People Arguing About Marriage" and "British Mega Musical: The Musical." There's even a poster that reads "Relevant: Winner of 15 Tony Awards." Interestingly enough, no Broadway musical has ever won 15 Tony Awards – unless you count "South Pacific", whose 17 Tonys were technically spread out across multiple years and multiple revivals.

Not even Shakespeare is spared. There's an advertisement for "Shakespeare: Does It Even Matter Which One?" which is meant to poke fun at the way Shakespeare is often labeled as "fine culture" by people who don't even understand Shakespeare.

Not only did Lin-Manuel Miranda find a way to preserve most of the songs from the 2001 musical; he also went to the Library of Congress archives and uncovered some songs of Jonathan Larson's that never saw the light of day, which he showcased in the Netflix film.

At the workshop, Karessa and the other singers perform the song "Sextet," which comes directly from "Superbia," the musical that real-life Larson spent eight years writing. "Play Game" and "Boho Days" also make comebacks in the movie. They both appeared in early drafts of "Tick, Tick... Boom!" when it was meant to be a solo rock monologue by Larson in the early 90's. The songs were cut from the 2001 Off-Broadway production but revived in the movie adaptation, says The Los Angeles Times.

Miranda also discovered Larson's song "Swimming" and realized it would be perfect for the movie. Interestingly enough, the song was filmed in a pool where Larson actually swam, but the director didn't even recognize it was the same pool until he listened to "Swimming." Miranda told The New Yorker, "There are lyrics that only make sense at that particular pool: 'red stripe, green stripe, forty feet, fifty feet.' That's the tiling in that pool."

And then there's "Debtor Club," a song from the earliest versions of the rock monologue. Larson replaced the song with "No More," says the Library of Congress. Still, the movie revives the song in a different form. As Howard Ho points out, an instrumental form of it is playing underneath the focus group scene.

When Michael fawns over his fancy new apartment, he sings, "No more ... throwing down the key because there is no buzzer." It sounds like an exaggeration, but this was a detail Lin-Manuel Miranda plucked straight from Jonathan Larson's life. Larson's fifth-floor apartment wasn't equipped with a buzzer, so that was the only way he could let his friends in without walking down five flights of stairs. "You had to call him from the phone booth across the street, and he threw the keys down," said Larson's agent Jonathan Craver in "No Day But Today."

"Tick, Tick... Boom" wasn't the first musical to depict this situation — Larson himself showed it in "Rent," in a scene where Tom asks Mark to throw down the keys in what must be a regular routine for them.

Later in the movie, viewers will see Susan (Alexandra Shipp) standing in the phone booth (which was actually filmed across the street from Larson's real apartment, according to Town & Country), trying to convince Larson to throw down the keys. If you listen closely, you'll notice Larson is starting to play the opening notes of "One Song Glory" from "Rent" before Susan's call interrupts him. In real life, Larson probably didn't compose "One Song Glory" until after the events of the movie, judging by his interview with American Theatre. But, as Miranda points out, the movie taunts us with the possibility of an alternate universe where Larson actually gets the idea for "Rent" that night — and then it dashes our hopes, of course, because Larson's big moment wouldn't come until years later.