Rent

The day before Rent opened in Off-Broadway previews in 1996, the musical’s creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly at age 35 of an aortic dissection. Although Jonathan Larson died on the evening of the final dress rehearsal, his breakthrough musical, his career continued through posthumous development of his earlier works, both onstage and in film. He wrote his first musical, Sacrimmoralinority (1981), later retitled Saved!—An Immoral Musical on the Moral Majority (1982), while he was a student at Adelphi University. After graduating, he wrote Superbia (1984), a science-fictional musical that was performed at Playwrights Horizons and won the Richard Rodgers Production Award and the Richard Rodgers Development Grant but was never fully produced. In 1986, the AIDS crisis became personal for Larson when his best friend since childhood, Matt O’Grady, shared that he was HIV positive. Within Larson’s group of six close friends, four were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, including Alison Gertz, who became a nationally known AIDS activist at 22 by drawing attention to the fact that she didn’t fit the stereotypical profile as a straight woman who didn’t use drugs and contracted HIV from a single sexual encounter at 16. Before she died at 26, she used her diagnosis to spread the word that AIDS can occur in anyone. Another friend, Pamela Shaw, was a former girlfriend of Larson’s, which presented the possibility that Larson was also exposed. He tested negative, but Shaw, as well as a fourth friend, Gordon Rogers, died in 1995 in their early 30s. Larson memorialized his friends in Rent by using their names for the attendees at the Life Support meeting, encouraging those involved with future productions to change the names in memory of their own lost loved ones.

In 1988, Larson started writing Rent with playwright Billy Aronson, who sought a composer to collaborate on his idea to adapt Puccini’s La Bohème into a musical with a contemporary storyline. The pair parted amicably due to creative differences, and Aronson agreed to give the project to Larson to complete alone, retaining credit for the original concept and additional lyrics. Elements of the storyline and character development are inspired by Larson’s autobiography, including his experiences as a young artist living in a Greenwich Village apartment that was strikingly similar to the one described in the musical.

On the day of the first preview, dealing with the fresh news of Larson’s death, the production team was unsure what to do about the show, although they felt that Larson wouldn’t have wanted it canceled. They spoke to Larson’s parents, who were already on their way to New York for the performance, and they were adamant that the show must go on. Director Michael Greif decided that the musical would be performed as scheduled, but as a staged reading. What happened that night has become an iconic moment in musical theater lore. The actors held to the staged reading format until they reached “La Vie Bohème” at the end of the first act. Then, they broke out into full staging and choreography, which they continued through the rest of the show. Larson’s untimely and tragic death, right on the cusp of achieving his dreams, became a part of the show’s intrigue—poignant evidence of the musical’s repeated assertion that there’s “no day but today” (45).

After Larson’s death, questions of authorship and plagiarism arose about the musical. Lynn M. Thompson, who started working on Rent as a dramaturg in 1995, filed a lawsuit against Larson’s estate under the claim that her contributions made up almost half of the script and storyline. Courts decided that her work fell under her original contract as the dramaturg. Novelist Sarah Schulman decided not to sue after recognizing specific moments and details, including the Maureen/Joanne storyline, as lifted from her semi-autobiographical novel People in Trouble (1990), a book that others remember Larson talking about. Schulman saw Rent as too beloved as an icon of the zeitgeist, particularly with the reverence brought about by Larson’s death, to be worth tackling in court, but she published her stance in her 1998 book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America.

While writing Rent, Larson also wrote what would become his other major musical, Tick…Tick…Boom! (1991),an autobiographical one-man show that he performed Off-Broadway. His longtime friend Victoria Leacock produced it. The main character is a musical theater composer named Jon, who is about to turn 30 and is questioning whether he ought to choose another career. After Larson’s death, Leacock asked Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn (Proof, 2000) to adapt the show into a three-person musical. The other two characters include Michael, based on Larson’s childhood best friend, Matt O’Grady, and Susan, who is based partially on Pamela Shaw. The revised musical opened Off-Broadway in 2001. Meanwhile, Rent was adapted as a major motion picture in 2005, directed by Chris Columbus and starring most of the original cast. The show ran on Broadway until 2008, becoming the 11th-longest-running Broadway show, and had multiple tours and international productions. The final Broadway performance was filmed and released as Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway, and in 2019, Fox aired Rent: Live, a live television production of the show. In 2021, Netflix released a film adaptation of Tick…Tick…Boom!, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.