THEATRICAL THROWBACK THURSDAY: RENT Premieres On Broadway
By: Pat Cerasaro Apr. 30, 2015
Today we are revisiting a seminal day in Broadway history, the premiere of rock musical RENT.
One Song Glory Lightning in a bottle is impossible to predict and even more difficult to plan for and the Broadway premiere of rock musical RENT in 1996 was precisely that - a cultural phenomenon unlike any other. More than any other musical of the 1990s except perhaps THE LION KING, RENT hit a major chord with audiences around the country and made a mark on the ears, hearts and minds of an entire group of devotees who would go on to be forever known as RENT-heads. Based loosely on Puccini's LA BOHEME, the story of the denizens of a Lower East Side apartment building who vociferously refuse to pay the titular living space fee, RENT boasted not only a riotously rocking and generally audaciously contemporary score, but also a uniquely designed original production outfitted with spectacular and inventive staging by Michael Greif. Telling the tale of a week in the lives of these bohemian individuals and their families, friends and fellow NYC neighbors, RENT was fiercely idiosyncratic and wildly unique - signaling the voice of what many assumed at the time would be a significant creative force in the theatre from then on, the show's composer, lyricist and bookwriter Jonathan Larson. Unfortunately, fate played a cruel hand and Larson took ill during rehearsals for the show Off-Broadway and passed away from an aortic aneurysm just as the musical was being presented before a paying audience for the very first time. As a result, RENT would be the message that Larson left to the world - and his only completed musical to play Broadway to date.
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