Rent
November 5-21, 2010

Dramaturgy by Ross Harmon
Cast | Production History | Rent On Broadway - The Nederlander Theatre | About The Author, Jonathan Larson | RENT | Puccini and "La Boheme"

RENT: PRODUCTION HISTORY

Rent is a rock opera with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York's Lower East Side, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS. The musical was first seen in a limited three-week workshop production at New York Theatre Workshop in 1994. The show went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, and soon moved to Broadway's larger Nederlander Theatre. On Broadway, Rent gained critical acclaim and won a Tony Award for Best Musical. The success of the show led to several national tours and numerous foreign productions, and in 2005 it was adapted into a motion picture that featured most of the original Broadway cast members.

Rent on Broadway: The Nederlander Theatre

Preview: Apr 16, 1996
Opening: Apr 29, 1996
Closing: Sep 7, 2008

Total Performances: 5123

Broadway Opening Night Cast

Gilles Chiasson - Steve, man with squeegee, and others
Taye Diggs - Benjamin Coffin III
Wilson Jermaine Heredia - Angel Schunard
Rodney Hicks - Paul, a cop, and others
Kristen Lee Kelly - Mark's mom, and others
Jesse L. Martin - Tom Collins
Idina Menzel - Maureen Johnson
Aiko Nakasone - Alexi Darling, Roger's mom, and others
Timothy Britten Parker - Gordon, the man, Mr. Grey, and others
Adam Pascal - Roger Davis
Anthony Rapp - Mark Cohen
Daphne Rubin-Vega - Mimi Marquez
Gwen Stewart - Mrs. Jefferson
Byron Utley - Mr. Jefferson
Fredi Walker - Joanne Jefferson

RENT: ABOUT JONATHAN LARSON, THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Larson (February 4, 1960 – January 25, 1996) was an American composer and playwright noted for the serious social issues of multiculturalism, addiction, homophobia, and AIDS explored in his work. Typical examples of his use of these themes are found in his works, Rent and tick, tick...BOOM!. He received three posthumous Tony Awards and a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the rock opera Rent.

Larson was born to Jewish parents, Allan and Nanette Larson, in White Plains, New York. He was exposed to the performing arts, especially music and theatre from an early age. Larson was also involved in acting in high school, performing in lead roles in various productions at White Plains High School.

Larson attended Adelphi University in Garden City, New York with a four-year scholarship as an Acting major, in addition to performing in numerous plays and musical theatre. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he participated in a summer stock theatre program at The Barn Theatre in Augusta, Michigan as a piano player, the result of which was the earning of an Union Card for membership in the Actors' Equity Association.

Larson moved to a loft with no heat on the fifth floor of a building at the corner of Greenwich Street and Spring Street in Lower Manhattan. From here, he held auditions for his cast. For about ten years Larson worked as a waiter at the Moondance Diner during weekends, and worked on composing and writing musicals during the weekdays. At the diner Larson met Jesse L. Martin, who was his waiting trainee and later would perform the role of Tom Collins in the original cast of Larson's Rent. Larson and his roommates lived in harsh conditions with little money or property.

Before composing and writing the musical Rent, his most popular and well-known work, Jonathan Larson wrote a variety of early theatrical pieces, with varying degrees of success and production.

Among his early creative works is Sacrimmoralinority, his first musical which was co-written with David Glenn Armstrong, and originally staged at his alma mater Adelphi University in the winter of 1981. Following Jonathan and David's graduation in 1982, and retitled Saved! - An Immoral Musical on the Moral Majority, the Brechtian-themed musical cabaret played a four-week showcase run and won both authors a writing award from ASCAP.

Between 1983 and 1990, Larson wrote Superbia, originally intended as a futuristic rock retelling of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, though the Orwell estate denied him permission to adapt the novel itself. Superbia won the Richard Rodgers Production Award and Development Grant. However, despite performances at Playwrights Horizons and at the Village Gate in 1989, Superbia was never fully produced.

His next work, completed in 1991, was a "rock monologue" entitled 30/90, which was later renamed tick, tick... BOOM!. This piece, written for only Larson with a piano and rock band, was intended to be a response to his feelings of rejection caused by the disappointment of Superbia. The show was performed off-Broadway at the Village Gate, as well as at the Second Stage Theater.

In addition to his three larger theatrical pieces written before Rent, Larson also wrote music for J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation, numerous individual numbers, music for Sesame Street, music for the children's book cassettes of An American Tail and Land Before Time, music for Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner, and performed in John Gray's musical Billy Bishop Goes to War which starred his close friend actor Roger Bart (Desperate Housewives), a musical called Mowgli, and four songs for the children's video Away We Go! (which he also conceived and directed).

RENT

Playwright Billy Aronson came up with the idea to write a musical update of La Bohème in 1988. He wanted to create "a musical inspired by Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, in which the luscious splendor of Puccini's world would be replaced with the coarseness and noise of modern New York".

In 1989, Aronson called Ira Weitzman with his idea, asking for ideas for collaborators, and Weitzman put Larson together with Aronson to collaborate on the new project. Larson came up with the title and suggested moving the setting from the Upper West Side to Downtown, where Larson and his roommates lived in a rundown apartment. For a while, he and his roommates kept an illegal, wood-burning stove due to lack of heat in their building, and he also dated a dancer for four years who sometimes left him for other men and eventually left him for a woman. These experiences would influence the autobiographical aspects of Rent. Larson wanted to write about his own experience, and in 1991, he asked Billy if he could use the original concept they collaborated on and make Rent his own. They made an agreement that if the show went to Broadway, Aronson would share in the proceeds. Eventually they decided on setting the musical not in SoHo, where Larson lived, but rather in Alphabet City in the East Village.

Rent started as a staged reading in 1993 at the New York Theatre Workshop, followed by a studio production that played a three-week run a year later. However, the version that is now known worldwide, a result of the years-long collaborative and editing process between Larson and the producers and director, was not publicly performed before Larson's death. Larson died of an aortic dissection, believed to have been caused by Marfan syndrome, in the early morning on January 25, 1996. It is believed that if the aortic dissection had been properly diagnosed and treated, Larson would have lived.

He had been suffering chest pains and also had nausea for several days prior, but doctors at St. Vincents Hospital could not find signs of a heart attack and so misdiagnosed it either as flu or stress. The show premiered off-Broadway that night, on schedule. Larson's parents (who were flying in for the show anyway) gave their blessing to open the show. Due to Larson's death the day before opening night, the cast agreed that they would premiere the show by simply singing it through, all the while sitting at three prop tables lined up on stage. But by the time the show got to its high energy "La Vie Boheme", the cast could no longer contain themselves and did the rest of the show as it was meant to be, minus costumes, to the crowd and the Larson family's approval.

Rent played through its planned engagement to sold-out crowds and was continuously extended. The decision was finally made to move the show to Broadway, and it opened at the Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996.

For his work on Rent, Larson was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score; the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics; the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical; the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical in the Off-Broadway category; and three Obie Awards for Outstanding Book, Outstanding Lyrics and Outstanding Music.

After his death, Larson's family and friends started the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation to provide monetary grants to artists, especially musical theatre composers and writers, to support their creative work. The Jonathan Larson Grants are now administered by the American Theatre Wing, thanks to an endowment funded by the Foundation and the Larson Family.

Jonathan's work was given to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in December 2003. The Jonathan Larson Collection is a new addition to its major holdings in the area of musical theater. The collection documents Larson’s surprisingly prolific output, including numerous musicals, revues, cabarets, pop songs, dance and video projects, both produced and unproduced.

RENT: PUCCINI AND “LA BOHEME”

Giacomo Antonio Puccini (22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924) was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire.

La bohème is an opera in four acts based on Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger. The world premiere performance of La bohème was in Turin on 1 February 1896 at the Teatro Regio. According to Opera America, it is the 2nd most frequently performed opera in the U.S., just behind another Puccini opera, Madama Butterfly.

Since the 16th century, the French word bohémian was used to refer to gypsies. As gypsies are associated in the common imagination with a wild and free life separate from rigid society, the name came to be associated with the counter-culture of young artists and other rebels in the Latin Quarter of 19th century Paris. This was a common colloquial term in Paris, when Henri Murger used it in the title of the stories which eventually became the basis for the opera. The fame of Murger's stories carried the term to the world beyond Paris and into other languages, such as English, where "bohemian" has a similar connotation.

Although Puccini's opera is in Italian, it was given a French title, shortening Murger's title to simply La bohème. A literal translation of this would be Bohemia but in the poetic sense of the word, not the geographic.

Rent Dramaturgy © 2010, Ross Harmon: The Barn Players

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