The show became a raging success, but Larson never lived to see it. The story behind Rent begins with the tragic story of Jonathan Larson, the composer and playwright, dying the night before his magnum opus began previews. ( The Room Where It Happens, Hamilton the Musical)

“Hey, that’s a lot less work.” : Alexander Hamilton. And he tries to convince the crew that RENT deserves to be paid the respect it’s owed.“…And all he had to do was die.” : Aaron Burr So Brandon tries the absolute most to get through the WHOLE, DAMNED, Original Broadway Cast, FORTY-TWO TRACK recording of the 1996 Broadway musical RENT.

So many flaws, in fact, that it’s significance in the Pivotal Music History canon has been called into question. The show eventually opened and played to sold-out houses, making it necessary to move to Broadway and win numerous Tony awards.Īs successful as RENT is, it is not without its flaws - largely due to it being unfinished (the show might’ve gone through even more changes during previews). After a few long moments, a voice from the audience finally spoke: “thank you, Jonathan Larson”. The evening of first previews a version of the show was performed and left the audience speechless, in a trance. He died of an aortic dissection, collapsing in his apartment in the early morning after the final dress, the morning after his one and only interview with the New York Times. Jonathan Larson never got to see his fully realized vision, nor the impact his hard work caused. Because of this, the mission was even stronger: give in to love, or live in fear. This modernized La Bohème had the perfect model to plug in activism and use theatre as a means for change.

The idea was to take Puccini’s opera La Bohème (based on Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème) and bring it to the East Village in the late eighties - a time when HIV/AIDS was raging and widely ignored. It took many forms - because of many, many rewrites - but the remaining constants were the source material and the mission. RENT is Pulitzer Prize winning rock opera that Jonathan Larson painstakingly worked on for the better part of a decade.

Jonathan larson rent live