by Cathy O'Connell
The Hartford Advocate
May 3, 1998

Once you claw your way past the oceans of hype--and especially given the modesty of its beginnings, there was a lot of it - one of the reasons Rent holds such strong appeal is that it does exactly what good opera did more than a century before. It's a genuine social touchstone, not a fantastical escape like Cats or Phantom of the Opera. The characters are young and struggling, gay and straight and come in all sorts of colors. What unites them is their absolute refusal to be beaten down by life.

That may explain in part why Rent, which comes to The Bushnell for a two-week run beginning May 13, touched off one of the biggest buzzes in recent theatrical history. Then again, the story behind it is worthy of a play itself. A struggling playwright named Jonathan Larson gets an idea one summer night in 1989 to write a musical that would update Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème. He had never seen the opera, only faint hints of it he remembered from a puppet version he'd seen as a child. But its mixed-bag milieu was like his own adopted neighborhood.

Larson toils away in obscurity, transforming late 19th century Paris into New York's East Village of the 1990s and substituting one deadly plague, tuberculosis, for another, AIDS. It takes a series of workshops and seven years to make his work presentable, and though he quite frankly envisioned what he was doing as "a Hair for the 1990s," its texture was darker. These young men and women weren't naive innocents; survival was as real to them as death.

And then just as Rent was to go into previews at the tiny New York Theater Workshop, on Jan. 25, Larson died of a cerebral aneurysm. He was only 35. That Rent really was something new and refreshingly honest at a time when the pretentious excesses of Andrew Lloyd Webber dominated much of musical theater on Broadway was part of the immediacy of its appeal, and that Larson died before he could savor the fruits of his long labor added to it. Spurring Rent on to Broadway was the cluster of awards with which it was showered: Four Tony Awards, six Drama Desk Awards, three Obies, Outer and New York Drama Critics' circles awards and a Pulitzer Prize.

There was also Larson's almost obsessive determination to create a work that would shake a stagnant Broadway out of its reliance on vapid spectacle. Shortly before his death, he told The New York Times that he wanted "to bring musical theater to the MTV generation." These were the young men and women like himself, who not only couldn't afford $70 Broadway tickets but would find little or nothing further uptown worth such a price. They also wanted to be artists but balanced their desire with unglamorous jobs--Larson worked in a diner for much of the time he was writing and composing Rent in his fourth-floor walkup in the East Village - to be able, well, to pay their rents.

What Larson understood so keenly--not unlike one of his idols, Stephen Sondheim--is that real art always addresses the larger and more universal questions in life with no intention of providing answers or drawing tidy conclusions. He also had the prescience and talent to be extremely wary of the trend of songwriters creating musical theater of their own. "Often, you get contemporary pop writers who know how to write a verse and a chorus," he told American Theater magazine, "but they don't necessarily know how to write an inner monologue where a character goes through a change by the end of the song so the plot and story continues."

Paul Simon, alas, whose Capeman was one of the costliest failures in Broadway history, should have listened to Larson. "In the staying power of his songs," wrote the Times' Frank Rich in March of 1996, "he lingers, refusing to let anyone who hears his voice abandon hope."