John Larson’s Musical ‘Rent’ portrays the coming generations attempts to create a vision for themselves in a complicated world. Based on Puccini’s beloved opera La Bohème, Rent follows the ups and downs of a year in the life of a group of impoverished, artistic friends living in Manhattan’s East Village. The musical is set in a dingy, disheveled loft apartment in New York’s East Village and depicts “young … artists struggling to celebrate life in the shadow of drugs, poverty and AIDS,” Jonathan Wiederhorn wrote in ROLLING STONE. RENT was first performed 20 years ago in perhaps a somewhat different world when social norms and acceptance was not rampant. In today’s modernity, even in our own society, personal beliefs aside, homosexuality does
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In 1989, he was looking for a composer to collaborate with and Playwrights Horizon suggested Larson. When the two met, Aronson said to Larson, "It’s time for a new Hair." Rent is Larson’s more positive view of the world, with details and people from his own life mixed in to give the story resonance. In real life, Larson himself had to throw his keys down to the street for people to get into his apartment, and he had to run orange extension cords all over his apartment to make up for the lack of outlets. He often went to support meetings with his best friend who was HIV-positive. He had once lost a girlfriend to another woman. All of this found its way into Rent, along with the names of three of his friends who had died of AIDS, in the support group scene. Larson’s lifelong goal was to combine the Broadway tradition with contemporary pop music, a very difficult task at which many before him had failed. After seven years of workshops and re-writes, the show was scheduled to open in previews off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, on January 25, 1996. But Larson had been feeling ill. He’d been to two hospitals; one diagnosed him with food poisoning, the other with the flu. The night before the first preview, after a great final dress rehearsal, Larson went home, put a pot of water on the stove for tea, collapsed, and died of an aortic aneurysm (Miller,
In 1989, he was looking for a composer to collaborate with and Playwrights Horizon suggested Larson. When the two met, Aronson said to Larson, "It’s time for a new Hair." Rent is Larson’s more positive view of the world, with details and people from his own life mixed in to give the story resonance. In real life, Larson himself had to throw his keys down to the street for people to get into his apartment, and he had to run orange extension cords all over his apartment to make up for the lack of outlets. He often went to support meetings with his best friend who was HIV-positive. He had once lost a girlfriend to another woman. All of this found its way into Rent, along with the names of three of his friends who had died of AIDS, in the support group scene. Larson’s lifelong goal was to combine the Broadway tradition with contemporary pop music, a very difficult task at which many before him had failed. After seven years of workshops and re-writes, the show was scheduled to open in previews off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, on January 25, 1996. But Larson had been feeling ill. He’d been to two hospitals; one diagnosed him with food poisoning, the other with the flu. The night before the first preview, after a great final dress rehearsal, Larson went home, put a pot of water on the stove for tea, collapsed, and died of an aortic aneurysm (Miller,