Rent won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony for Best Musical; creator Jonathan Larson, who loosely based it on Puccini's La Bohème, died before its off-Broadway premiere.
Rent closed on Broadway in 2008, so seeing it today generally means a touring, regional, or licensed community-theater production rather than a Broadway house.
The structure is lifted almost intact from Puccini. Mimi is Mimì, Roger is Rodolfo, Mark is Marcello, Maureen is Musetta, Collins is Colline, and the landlord who wants his money is Benoit under a new name. Jonathan Larson kept the bones of La Bohème and changed the disease: tuberculosis in a Paris garret becomes HIV in an East Village loft with the heat shut off. He wrote the book, the music and the lyrics, and the score is genuinely rock rather than rock-flavoured show writing — guitars foregrounded, several numbers built on a repeated figure instead of a verse-chorus shape.
Larson died of an aortic dissection, later attributed to undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, in the early hours of 25 January 1996, after the final dress rehearsal at New York Theatre Workshop. The company performed the first preview that evening. The show moved to the Nederlander Theatre on 41st Street in April, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and four Tony Awards that year, including Best Musical, Best Book and Best Original Score, and ran until September 2008 — 5,123 performances.
One of its lasting effects was commercial rather than artistic. Larson wanted the audience he was writing about to be able to get in, so the production held the front rows back for a same-day queue sold at a flat low price. The practice worked, spread, and is the ancestor of the rush and lottery policies that most Broadway shows now operate.
The piece has quietly become a period work, and knowing which period matters. Its East Village of squatters, tenant evictions and AIDS wards was already receding when it opened; effective combination antiretroviral therapy arrived in the same period, and within a few years the diagnosis at the center of the plot no longer carried the meaning the script assumes. That does not date the show so much as fix it — it is a record of a specific and short-lived moment, written from inside it by someone who did not live to see it end.
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Rent is a rock musical with music, lyrics, and book by Jonathan Larson. Loosely based on the 1896 opera La bohème by Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Illica, and Giuseppe Giacosa, it tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists struggling to survive and create a life in Lower Manhattan's East Village, in the thriving days of the bohemian culture of Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.
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