Rent Ending 12 Broadway Years
The Award Winning Rock Musical Closes After 5,000 Performances
Jonathon Larson's work transferred the spirit of La Bohème to Manhattan's East Village, attracting young people to the theater, winning a Pulitzer and four Tony awards.
RENT The Musical will end its tremendous 12-year stand at the historic Nederlander Theater in September 2008 as the seventh longest running Broadway show of all time, with over 5,000 performances. Its final show on Sunday September 7, 2008 is the climax of eight performances that week.
According to Campbell Robertson of the New York Times, RENT’s attendance began to decline in 2007, and the producers announced the show would close in June 2008. That date was later pushed back to September. Tickets for the last eight performances soon became difficult to find.
The rock musical is a re-imagining of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème, moving the scene from Paris’ 1830s bohemian district to New York City’s East Village, where artists and musicians struggled with poverty and AIDs in the 1980s. As Broadway.com said, the show's roots "were in graffiti-strewn alleys, heatless lofts, fluorescent-lit subway cars, dingy bars and auditoriums."
And as cast member Daphne Rubin-Vega added in her goodbye on the RENT website, "not everyone gets it (RENT), but those who do, get it good."
RENT Opened A Century After Toscanini Introduced La Bohème
RENT opened off Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop in February 1996, almost exactly a century after Conductor Arturo Toscanini introduced La Bohème in Turin, Italy. RENT moved to the Nederlander Theater in April 1996 and there it took the theatrical world by storm.
It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, four Tony awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award and the Obie Award. Young people, who became known as "RENTheads," flocked to a Broadway theater for the first time, helping make the musical an early box office success. Newsweek featured RENT on its cover, the first time a Broadway musical graced the cover of a national newsmagazine since A Chorus Line. The cast was invited to sing "Seasons of Love" at the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
In addition to Rubin-Vega, the 1996 cast included Tave Diggs, Idina Menzel, Jesse L. Martin, Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp.
RENT Opened Two Weeks After Composer Jonathan Larsen Died
Jonathan Larson spent seven years writing the book, lyrics and music for RENT, but died of an aortic aneurysm on the night of the final dress rehearsal. He was 35. The show opened two weeks after his death with Michael Greif as director.
Larson composed 30 songs for the show, including "Seasons of Love," "You Okay, Honey?" "One Song Glory," "Goodbye, Love," "On the Street," "Another Day" and RENT, which featured the classic line "we won’t pay."
Robertson said RENT includes portraits of Larson’s friends, as well as "artists and addicts in his neighborhood, young people on the edge of poverty and in the shadow of AIDS."
It was a heavy plot for a musical to carry, but according to the New York Times, RENT grossed $280 million on Broadway and another $330 million in road shows. It has been performed on six continents. In May 2008 it was nearing 5,000 performances. A film version was less successful.
RENT’s 2008 road schedule included May performances in California, Washington and Calgary, followed by June shows in St. Paul, MN, Stamford, CT and the Wolf Trap Theater in Vienna, VA. Other road tours were expected to be announced.
References:
- Campbell Robertson, The New York Times, January 16, 2008
- Internet Broadway Database (IBDB)
- RENT The Musical on Broadway.com
- Mount Holyoke.edu/courses
