When “Rent” opened at the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway 25 years ago next month, the likes of Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were all clamoring for tickets. David Geffen coughed up a million bucks just for the chance to make the cast recording. Whitney Houston wanted to work with Jonathan Larson’s profoundly emotional score.
And every slumming New Yorker with cash wanted the chance to share the orchestra with the edgy “Rent-heads” from the East Village, the hipster kids who’d stand in line all day to snag $20 front-row tickets for “No Day But Today.”
Broadway had never seen such a marriage of commerce and cool. And, in 1996, it had no idea how prescient this form of chic radicalism would turn out to be. In one of the great ironies of its era, “Rent,” the ultimate anti-gentrification musical, actually contributed to the very phenomenon it was fighting against.
To its Gen X fan base, there were no “Seasons of Love” worth having in the suburbs, no diverse community of friends to be forged in the shadow of their parents’ restrictive desires. Downtown Manhattan was the epicenter.
You might say “Rent,” which would run on Broadway for a dozen years and eventually bring its seasons of love to half the world, was just too brilliant a work for its own social good.
But on Tuesday night at a virtual benefit for the New York Theatre Workshop, an oral and performative history of a different “Rent” flowed front and center on thousands of laptops across the world. This event, available though Saturday, heralded the artistic purity of the show that had started on E. 4th St.
The one that was a real attempt to reflect the neighborhood beyond that theater’s walls. The one that was willed into being by Larson and a gifted original cast. The one that bespoke of a young composer’s genius and his lust for a realized success that he never got to experience in life.
Larson had begun this odyssey by taking surely the most famous bicycle ride in Broadway history, dropping off the script and score to his musical version of “La Boheme” on a desk at the New York Theatre Workshop.
And for him, it ended when the 35-year-old died on the morning of Jan. 26, 1996, the day of the first Off-Broadway preview performance of “Rent.” Larson fell in his own kitchen due to an aortic dissection, which doctors previously had misdiagnosed as either influenza or stress.
Larson was not the first brilliant talent to die young, or even when a show was on the cusp of opening — the same fate befell Lorraine Hansberry, to name just one — but that didn’t mitigate the loss.
Oh, what Jonathan Larson surely would have written since!
On Tuesday, many of those present 25 years ago, including the director Michael Greif — a disciplined theatrical structuralist who turned out to be the perfect foil for Larson’s wet emotionalism — and Larson’s sister, Julie, were there to recall the shock of that day.
They recounted their determination that, as night fell, the theater would be filled with his whimsy, his soaring ballads and his choral declarations of radical solidarity, even in the face of subjugation and the ravages of AIDS.
Larson was of the generation that was rejecting property, monetarism and, well, the acquisition of useless stuff. He wrote songs of experience, of families formed of friends, of a determination to love without judgment. Perhaps more than any other composer in a single moment, he found an entirely new audience and charted the future course of Broadway, and maybe even New York itself.
He just couldn’t know that in the moment.
But his friends charted the way forward.
Tuesday’s emotional celebration featured rare cassette demos of Larson singing “Seasons of Love” and “La Vie Boheme,” as well as the show’s dusty original props and grainy film and photos of the composer’s young life, being as that was the only life he had to live.
And there were, of course, performances from the likes of Idina Menzel and Adam Rapp, to name just two of the careers and lives that “Rent” changed for good. At one point, the screen filled with little Zoom boxes of hundreds of “Rent” performers from New York, and from all over the world.
But far more of those changed lives were just watching at home.
