Movies - Rent

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Rent is a Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical. It opened in New York City on April 29, 1996, at the Nederlander Theatre and continues to play on Broadway (the seventh-longest running Broadway musical as of March 1, 2006). Based upon Puccini's opera La bohème, the musical centers on a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive in New York's Alphabet City neighborhood under the shadow of AIDS (in La bohème the disease was tuberculosis).

The cast album from the show was the most successful recording of an American musical in almost 30 years, featuring both a 2-Disc, "complete recording" collection with a remixed version of the song "Seasons of Love" featuring Stevie Wonder, and a 1-disc "best of" highlights.

At the time, Rent was rare among Broadway musicals in that it featured some of the first clearly gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender characters on stage. Almost every previous production that dealt with such issues had generally been relegated to off-Broadway venues (an exception is La Cage aux Folles
).

Creative process

Playwright Billy Aronson came up with the original idea to write a musical update of La bohème in 1988. He wanted to create "a musical based on 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 Jonathan Larson, a 29-year-old composer, got together with Aronson to swap ideas. Larson came up with the title and suggested moving the setting from the Upper West Side to downtown, where Larson himself lived. In 1991, he asked Billy if he could use the original concept on which they had collaborated and make Rent his own. They made an agreement that if the show went to Broadway, Aronson would share in the proceeds.

Jonathan Larson lived for Rent for several years, making several rewrites and changes and writing hundreds of songs for the show- 44 are in the final version. He died from an undiagnosed aortic dissection in the early morning of January 25, 1996, just a few hours after the musical had its final dress rehearsal at the New York Theatre Workshop; the show was to open that very day. It is believed that the defect resulted from Marfan syndrome.

The show did premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop the very day Jonathan Larson died, January 25, 1996, upon the request of his parents, who were flying in anyway to see the show. It was a monster hit even during the dress rehearsals leading up to its off-Broadway opening night, and premiered at the David Nederlander Theatre on Broadway on April 29, 1996.

Plot

The musical follows the lives of a handful of New Yorkers over the course of a year as they struggle with the purpose of living, housing, relationships, loss, and AIDS.

Characters include Roger, a musician suffering from HIV and recovering from heroin addiction; Mark, a struggling film maker; Maureen, Mark's bisexual performance artist ex-girlfriend; Tom Collins, a teacher at New York University (NYU) who is HIV-positive and a friend and former roommate of Roger and Mark; Angel, Collins' drag queen lover, also HIV-positive and a street percussionist/musician; Benny, an old friend and another former roommate of Mark and Roger who later became their landlord; Mimi, an HIV-positive dancer and heroin junkie; and Joanne, a Harvard-educated lawyer and Maureen's girlfriend.

Act One

On Christmas Eve, Mark decides to begin shooting a film without a script. We learn that his roommate, Roger, is a musician who lost his inspiration when his girlfriend (April) committed suicide after finding out that the two of them were HIV-positive. Meanwhile, their former pal Benny, who married a wealthy woman, Alison Grey of Wesport, and bought the lot next door to Mark and Roger's apartment building (which he also owns), breaks his promise to let them live in the apartment for free and asks for the rent, which he knows they don't have. He says he'll let it slide and sign papers saying that they can live in the apartment rent-free -- if they get Maureen, a performance artist and Mark's ex-girlfriend, to cancel her protest against his plan to develop the lot, which is currently the site of a homeless tent city. He believes that Mark can do this because he used to date Maureen (before she dumped him for a female lawyer named Joanne).

Outside, Tom Collins, a former professor of computer age philosophy who used to live with Roger and Mark as well, is trying to get in after coming home from teaching at MIT. However, he is jumped by thugs and lies bleeding on the street. Angel, a transvestite drag queen and street drummer, spots Collins and comes to his aid. They are attracted to one another and quickly discover that they both have AIDS. They leave the alley to tend to Collins' wounds.

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Movies - Rent

Creative process

Plot

Act One

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