Rent

No Day But Today: Broadway's 'Rent' Sign Comes Down

At its close, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning musical by the late lyricist-librettist-composer Jonathan Larson will have played 5,124 performances and 16 previews, making it the seventh longest-running musical in Broadway history.

Larson, who famously and tragically died at age 35 of heart disease linked to Marfan Syndrome - on Jan. 25, 1996, the day before the show's first preview Off-Broadway - used Puccini's opera La Boh�me as a jumping-off point for his own 1990s-set show about lovers and artists struggling to connect in the age of AIDS.

Sex, death, prejudice, artistic expression, media, celebrity, selling out, friendship, existential angst - and "how about love?," as one lyric goes - are among ideas in the musical, directed by Michael Greif on designer Paul Clay's spare and utilitarian set. Greif's directing career blossomed following Rent's 1996 Off-Broadway bow, the Broadway transfer and its international success. He would revisit the show and help maintain its quality throughout its Broadway life.

....The producers proudly point out that Rent was responsible for helping to usher in a number of important changes to Broadway and its marketing, "including the use of simpler, more contemporary advertising and logo design" and "the institution of same day front row seats priced at $20."

It was the first show to sell same-day orchestra seats for $20, in a curbside lottery system. Rent attracted a huge number of repeat visitors who came to be known as Rentheads. (That's who was screaming nightly from the first two rows, in case you ever wondered. The sold-out final performance also offered cheap tickets via lottery.)

... Rent also inspired a new generation of theatre writers. Nick Blaemire, who wrote songs for Broadway's short-lived 2008 musical Glory Days, told Playbill.com earlier this year, "Obviously people have been doing this for a long time - we're not the first people to be writing a pop musical. I remember hearing Rent and thinking, 'Oh my God, these people are singing like they speak - and there's no pretense. If that was possible, why don't we just give it a shot?'"

... Rent won every major best musical award, including the Tony Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award.

I have never paid to see a Broadway show twice. Until Rent.

It was the show I always dreamed of, as a rocker with a taste for theater, as a post-Garland gay man and as a hopeless romantic.

Here's a couple of my faves from the show (via, alas the less than perfect movie) If you don't cry during these songs, you're dead.

I do think that every gay kid in the world dreamed about a song like this:

'I'll Cover You'



Rent was born in a New York still struggling with the AIDS crisis, when AZT was the only thing keeping people alive. The importance of grave illness in Rent's story matched it's importance in my storyline. I saw the show for the first time less than a month before my mother was diagnosed with leukemia (and, so, also, less than two months before her death). The CD accompanied me on each of the 20 trips I made to Ohio in the year following my night with Mark, Mimi, Rodger, Collins and Angel.

This song was particularly moving as it simply, elegiacally addresses fears we all confront.

'Will I '