RENT to be Presented at San Francisco Playhouse This Holiday Season
Performances will run December 11, 2026 – February 6, 2027.
San Francisco Playhouse will celebrate the holidays with the Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical phenomenon Rent. Loosely based on Puccini's La bohème, Jonathan Larson resets the action to Manhattan's East Village on the precipice of the Millennium, where a ragtag group of artist friends struggle to create and get by. With an electrifying score including “Seasons of Love,” “La Vie Bohème,” and “Take Me or Leave Me,” this life-affirming Broadway musical spotlights the power of community, love, forgiveness, and hope that still resonates 30 years after it revolutionized musical theatre. San Francisco Playhouse Artistic Director Bill English helms this musical with musical direction by Dave Dobusky and choreography by Vince Chan.
Premiering Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop days after Larson's passing, Rent transferred to Broadway in 1996, where it won the Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Book of a Musical as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It ran for more than 10 years on Broadway and was adapted into a film.
It features half a dozen of the most powerful theater songs the contemporary theater has produced.” It ran for six months at San Francisco's Golden Gate Theatre in 1999, where San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed Rent “The musical theater ride of the year. Exhilarating, impassioned, bursting with capital-R Romantic feeling.” Recently, The New York Times wrote Rent “Upended Broadway's sense of what musical theater could be” and San Diego Union-Tribune remarked “'Rent' still tugs at the heartstrings. Enduring and still electric.”
Previews will run Friday, December 11 – Wednesday, December 16, 2026, with an official opening on Thursday, December 17, 2026, and a closing date of Saturday, February 6, 2026.
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Bye Bye Birdie Warren Theater (9/18-10/04) |
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Gutenberg! The Musical! Hillbarn Theatre (10/08-11/01) |
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Hello, Dolly! Hillbarn Theatre (4/15-5/09) |
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Based on a Totally True Story City Lights Theater Company (1/21-2/14) |
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PlayGround Twisted Holiday Festival Potrero Stage (12/04-12/11) |
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Hamilton (Angelica Company) San Jose Center for the Performing Arts (7/07-7/18) |
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Antony+Cleopatra Sue Bierman Park (9/19-9/27) PHOTOS |
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Hadestown (Non-Equity) Orpheum Theatre San Francisco (1/07-1/10) |
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Hadestown Teen Edition Berkeley Playhouse (7/10-7/18) |
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“Inspiración: Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers” Center for New Music (5/15-5/15) |
