by Katie Johnston
Gazette.Com
April 6, 2000

Since its debut in 1996, "Rent" has become the most raved-about American musical in decades.

Critics and crowds have been thrilled by the rock opera with a message of hope amid despair based loosely on Puccini's "La Boheme" - "the 'Hair' of the '90s" some have cried - but there's something more, something real, behind the story of this pop-culture phenomenon.

Writer Jonathan Larson spent seven years toiling over "Rent," waiting tables in SoHo, subsisting on tubs of pasta and bricks of shredded wheat. Then one January night as he was preparing a kettle of tea, Larson suffered an aortic aneurysm and died - a week shy of his 36th birthday, a day before his show's first performance.

"Rent" quickly stockpiled tremendous success. The entire five-week run sold out a day after it opened; by the end of the week, tickets to the monthlong extension were snapped up as well. The production soon moved uptown to Broadway's Nederlander Theater; it won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama and four Tony Awards, along with a slew of other honors.

Although five years have slipped away since Larson's untimely passing, his legacy remains.

"We think about that a lot," says Saycon Sengbloh, who has played Mimi for four months in the traveling company. The show makes its Colorado Springs premiere Tuesday at the Pikes Peak Center.

A member of Larson's family affixed a plaque to the stage in memory of Larson - "just to have a little piece of Jonathan with us every time we go on," Sengbloh says - and cast members touch it when they go by.

"Rent" takes the idea of "La Boheme" and slashes it through with modern-day strife. Instead of Parisian artists struggling to survive in the early 19th century, "Rent" explores the Bohemian world of Manhattan's East Village. Puccini's poet Rodolfo becomes Roger, an HIV-positive punk rocker; painter Marcello transforms into filmmaker Mark; Mimi is still Mimi, morphed from a tuberculosis-stricken seamstress into an HIV-positive junkie and dancer. Throw in a sexy performance artist, a lesbian lawyer, a philosophy teacher in love with a drag queen and a yuppie landlord, and you've got "Rent."

Sengbloh, 22 and of Liberian descent, describes Mimi as a cool girl, a spunky girl. "She is fire fire," Sengbloh says, explaining with a laugh that in her hometown of Atlanta, people frequently use "fire" as a positive adjective.

Had Larson been from Atlanta, he, too, might have been called "fire fire." But Larson was from White Plains, N.Y., where as a child he staged backyard productions of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gilligan's Island." By the time he was a senior at Adelphi University on Long Island, Larson had written eight cabaret shows and worked his way into Stephen Sondheim's house to ask for career advice. Stick to composing, Sondheim told him.

Larson moved to New York in 1982, working as a caterer and lugging a 5-foot Crayola crayon around SoHo for a novelty store before landing a job at the Moondance Diner. He waited tables there for more than a decade, finally quitting in the fall of 1995, confident that "Rent" would support him.

He had created a hero who sang like Kurt Cobain and a transvestite who sang like De La Soul. He visited East Village lesbian clubs and HIV support groups to authenticate his characters. He secured $250,000 worth of backing and a theater troupe, the small but distinguished New York Theatre Workshop.

On the night of the final dress rehearsal, a reporter from the New York Times told Larson off the record that he thought Larson had a hit show on his hands. It was the only professional review Larson would ever hear. By 1 a.m. the next morning, he was dead.

Larson never got to see how his creation would touch people. He wouldn't have dreamed of the "Rentheads" who follow the production from town to town.

But Saycon Sengbloh knows. She's received the letters written by fans, detailing how "Rent" correlates to their lives.

Because the venues are so large, Sengbloh tries to make the production more intimate by focusing on one member of the crowd when she sings. "I'll pick a person sometimes and let the show be for them," she says.

Puccini's Mimi dies at the end of "La Boheme," but Sengbloh is cagey about what happens to her Mimi. "It's all in how you look at it," she says.

With that philosophy in mind, it's not hard to see how, through "Rent," Jonathan Larson lives on.