"Rent: The Podcast" and active RENT forums

[Calypso2]

Hi there! Two questions:

Does anyone know what happened to "Rent: The Podcast" that was talked about on Playbill and if there is still a way to hear it? It was on Apple Podcasts but no longer exists. I reached out to the people behind the "Everything Is Rent" podcast and they didn't know about it. I accessed the old RENT site via the Internet Archive and was able to find a bunch of interviews and video clips but the Podcast link no longer works. 

https://www.playbill.com/article/rent-heads-can-snag-podcasts-about-their-favorite-rock-musical-com-131943

Not sure if all this falls under the "no bootleg appeals" rule and I apologize if I'm breaking it. 

Regardless, can someone please point me in the direction of active RENT forums/communities? All of the links I've been finding are either dead or inactive. Ever since the moment I heard Renée's voice in Hamilton on Disney+ my inner teenage RENThead was brought back to life like Mimi. A lot has changed on the internet since the late 2000's and I have a lot of lost time to make up for. 

Thank you!

[batboysings]

Remember the Compulsive Bowlers site? Wow. flashbacks.

[Calypso2]

Wasn’t around for that one. http://musicals.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=68 Is inactive. I am amazed a fragment of the Tripod sites still exist, like these: http://atlantis2001.tripod.com/testrent.html http://members.tripod.com/Melissa_Umlor/rentindex.html You have to click around to find links that work.

[LizzieCurry]

As a former mod of Compulsive Bowlers, I can almost assure you there are no currently active Rent message boards.

[Calypso2]

LizzieCurry said: "As a former mod of Compulsive Bowlers, I can almost assure you there are no currently active Rent message boards."


FML. Well, can you please point me in the direction of urls— fan sites or message boards—that were active 2006-2008 so I can scour the Internet Archive for information, preferably ones that didn’t require a login? If not, any urls of awesome sites from over the years would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. 
 

Looks like I’m contacting Playbill.

[veronicamae]

Livejournal was once a big home of Broadway fandom. You can do some searching there for communities - usually, they were just abandoned, not deleted, and since the site still exists, so to will those communities. Whether or not you can see all the content there (sometimes you have to be logged in / a member of the community, or images were hosted on a deleted Photobucket for example) is another story.

[LizzieCurry]

Fandoms of individual shows don't really have their own individual stomping grounds anymore when it comes to message boards and forums. That died out pretty much in the mid/late-2000s. You can try Tumblr, but it's hard to navigate without having your own account, and learning the quirks and moods there is a process (which can be fruitful, but still).

[thejcm]

LizzieCurry said: "As a former mod of Compulsive Bowlers, I can almost assure you there are no currently active Rent message boards."

As a former member of Compulsive Bowlers, thank you for being a mod for us! I met one of my best friends through CB and I really felt like part of a community there.

The only Rent resource I miss more than CB was the Angelfire or Geocities website that had compiled cast lists for an astounding number of Rent performances (both on Broadway and on Tour).

[LizzieCurry]

You're very welcome! It was (generally) a good time! Especially when the official Rent site launched a forum and there was a war for like 2 days...

I think that was a user named MistyInTheRiver. That was a spreadsheet of every performer in every performance they could find info on, right? It was epic.

[Calypso2]

From the dates on the post notes, the RENT scene on tumblr is dead and has been for many years. It was brought back for a few moments with RENT Live but died again. I’m a huge tumblr nerd so I started there. The driving force behind tumblr’s theater scene seems to be Hamilton and newer shows.

LiveJournal, that’s a throwback!

Spreadsheet of every performer in every performance…my mind just exploded. Damn.

I’m mainly in music fandoms that have communities and just migrated platform to platform or withstood time. Why did the official forum end and where did you guys go after that?

[DooWahDiddy]

This reminds me of the days when Playbill had chat rooms. Anybody remember THOSE?

[LizzieCurry]

I met a few people in the Playbill chat rooms! Had to have been 1999 or so? I was in the Playbill chat rooms around the same time I started my LiveJournal life. I'm still friends with a lot of people I met on LJ.

I honestly don't remember when Compulsive Bowlers went away. I can say I don't recall discussing the Adam/Anthony reunion Rent tour there, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen and wasn't around back then.

[DooWahDiddy]

LizzieCurry said: "I met a few people in the Playbill chat rooms! Had to have been 1999 or so?"

I met my wife in there! I mean, my ex-wife. The marriage went the same way the chat rooms did, lolllllll.

 

[Calypso2]

There were two Compulsive Bowlers forums, the .com and the .org. The .org is no longer up but was up at least until mid 2012 according to the Internet Archive and the 2007 Adam/Anthony Reunion was discussed. Clicked around and some links opened but the majority didn't. Found one thread on the podcast with no replies and the link didn't open.


I've been going through the GeoCities archives for RENT stuff and cross referencing the dead links in the Internet Archive. So far no spreadsheet site but am on the hunt. Been jumping down countless rabbit holes.


Sent a message to Playbill but didn't get a reply so far. I'm going to reach out to Apple Podcasts and see if they have any info and if that's a dead end I'll post on the Lost Media Wiki's forum.


Found the RENT community on tumblr and it is semi active. Had to dig a bit.


Does anyone know what happened to the "30 Days of RENT" videos that used to be on Broadway World? The videos no longer load.

[FindingNamo]

My memory of Compulsive Bowlers is how funny some of the story tellers were. I was not at the performance when Gilles the Squeegee Man was a last minute substitute for Anthony Rapp's Mark, but the transcription of whatever the hell it is his brain made up on the spot where "And Maureen Johnson, fresh from her performance..." was supposed to go had me crying huge tears, I was laughing so hard, I may as well have been there. Or the post card back to the cast from Daphne after she left to go make "Wild Things" in Florida: "Matt Dillon is a HO!". 

[LizzieCurry]

LOL. I totally forgot about that.

I also remember a Broadway cast member selling her bed on CompulsiveBowlers. I wonder if anyone from the board actually took her up on that.

The board that preceded CB was by that guy who took a bunch of donations allegedly to renew the site, but he took the money and ran, right? I'm trying to remember. I think I wrote my review of the closing night of the Benny tour there.

There was an interim Rent message board hosted at — I think — cjb.net (a very young friend of mine did that and I remember some late nights on Yahoo Messenger with the poor guy not realizing how stressful it would be), and then someone finally got a domain and actually paid for hosting CB.