Renegotiating: Jonathan Larson's Rent (1996) and How It Changed the Rules

It was 1996 when I sat in the Nederlander Theatre on West 41st Street in New York City, and like so many others there before me, I was sobbing, because of Rent, tears streaming down my face. My sister glared at me. "The show hasn't even started yet," she pointed out, "so why are you crying?"

I was crying because I was finally in New York City, finally in a Broadway Theatre, finally about to see a Broadway musical, with the original cast no less. "This is where I'm meant to be," I sobbed, "and I'm finally here." If I couldn't be on the other side of the footlights (or at the back of the theatre, taking notes on how well my new hit musical was going, at least I could settle for being in the audience!).

Rent had just won the Tony a few months before for best musical, best book, best score, best featured actor, and had been nominated for six more awards in other categories. It won the Drama Desk, the Pulitzer Prize, the Theatre World Award, the Outer Critic's Circle Award, the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award. About the only award it didn't win was the Grammy, where it was beaten by Riverdance, ruining the Grammy's credibility beyond all repair, though unknowingly they soldier on.

I didn't know what to expect except at one point someone would sing the lyrics "five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes", and someone else would jump on a table and sing "La Vie Bohème," because I saw those on the Tony Awards broadcast. I knew it was a loose retelling of the opera La Bohème, which premiered exactly 100 years earlier, but I'd been bored by it, so hadn't watched the whole thing, but I was fairly sure from general reading that Mimi died of consumption (not consumption as in over-eating, but consumption as in tuberculosis—they called it consumption because the disease appeared to consume you, I suppose).

It began slowly ... well, not slowly exactly, but oddly. There was voice mail. There were songs that didn't amount to anything. And then the title song, so full of rock energy, and you could feel everyone engage, shortly followed by the beautiful, heartbreaking "One Song Glory," about the urge to create art, to make something lovely, before you die. Rent was surrounded by death. Half the characters had contracted HIV. The auteur behind the plot, lyrics, and music had died unexpectedly the night before the off-broadway production's opening night, never himself getting the chance to see the success of the lovely thing he had wrought. You simply couldn't watch Rent and not think about young people dying, and how horrible and wasteful it was that that would ever happen.

One of the most gorgeous, wrenching songs is set at a support group, sung as a round (a form ordinarily reserved for children's fare like "Row Row Row Your Boat"), with these lyrics:

Will I lose my dignity?

Will someone care?

Will I wake tomorrow

From this nightmare?

And we in the audience knew the answers were probably, hopefully, and no, you won't.

But Broadway had dealt with death before. Sure, occasionally there was a Gypsy about the difficulty of parents (see also Falsettos), or something light like 42nd Street where the star only breaks a leg. But some of Broadway's most immortal classics dealt directly with death, whether Oklahoma, Carousel, or South Pacific, West Side Story, Camelot, Oliver, Cabaret, death was how you told the audience "we might be singing and dancing, but you can take us seriously, because characters die." (See again Falsettos).

No, that wasn't what made Rent seem so special. What spoke to me was that the cast of characters was so ordinary. They weren't rich. They might be dying (very slowly), but not in a unique way that warranted musicalization. They hadn't been cursed to resemble a Beast, they weren't trying to exact revenge by slicing the throats of their barbershop customers, they weren't even twins separated at birth, or caught up in a revolution, or left behind in Saigon. They were just poor(ish) artists in New York City, living in the rough section to the lower east side (but not the Lower East Side itself), a land known as Alphabet City because they ran out of numbers and switched to letters, having counted down from 12 instead of the other way around.

And they sang about their lives in a sort of rock recitative, and sometimes in a sort of rock song, and it didn't sound a bit like the Broadway shows I was used to (from albums, not from attendance), and though I loved them, this was new and fresh. Yes, Hair had rock songs too (and so did numerous imitators of Hair, most of whom failed miserably), but Hair's rock songs were 30 years old at this point, hardly of the moment, and just as quaint as anything by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Nor did the songs sound like Stephen Sondheim (who writes amazing, complex, aspirational songs that are usually just 10% too clever to be picked up by ear: you won't get TikTokers challenging each other singing "I Read" from Passion). There was the occasional operetta (e.g. Jane Eyre), with zero fun songs, and there was of course Andrew Lloyd Webber (and sometimes still is). In this tired and stale environment, something like Rent was due. (Sorry, I had to).

It left its mark, but it took time. The next seasons saw a return to the time-worn sounds of Broadway, new operettas, new da-da-da-da-da da! Broadway-style tunes, more Disney. It takes time to write musicals, and the young composers, the ones most likely to be inspired by Larson's opus, were just getting their feet wet. Avenue Q may have been the first true spiritual successor, and it bowed in 2003. Duncan Sheik's Spring Awakening shook up the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in 2006. Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights premiered in 2007 off-Broadway (and yes, someone wins a lottery ticket, but it's not the prime mover of the play itself).

Twenty years on from then, death is just as prominent as ever (Kimberly Akimbo, Big Fish, Six: the Musical, Death Becomes Her). But new fans of Broadway shows (and they are legion) take it for granted that songs will be fresh, modern, and singable, whether enjoying Sara Bareilles' Waitress or Pasek and Paul's Dear Evan Hansen. And every-other off-broadway musical seems to be an autobiographical confessional retelling of their earnest composer's life story, to the point that we're tired of it. And for that, I credit Rent.

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Notes and Links

Jonathan Larson - revolutionary writer who mixed rock energy with traditional storytelling to comment on social issues

La Bohème - 1896 Puccini opera about Parisian artists struggling with poverty and sickness

Recitative - singing in a conversation style, often on one note, so when the note changes, you notice

Rent: 1996 Tony Awards - a chance to see the original cast in action, including Idina Menzel, Anthony Rapp, Taye Diggs, and Adam Pascal.