by Christine Dolen
Herald Theater Critic
April 19, 1998

Jonathan Larson, who died far too young at 35, was a man with a mission, and it was not a modest one: He came to believe that he could be the future of the American musical theater, and flat-out said so to his friends.

Born into middle-class comfort in White Plains, N.Y., educated on a four-year theater scholarship at Adelphi University, Larson abandoned acting to focus on creating musicals, even though his choice meant years of struggle and poverty; as his mentor, Stephen Sondheim, pointed out, New York is home to many more unemployed actors than out-of-work composers.

And Larson was good. Great, even.

How great? Larson's Rent, which opens Tuesday at Miami Beach's Jackie Gleason Theater with advance ticket sales of over $1.5 million for its two-week run (you can still get good seats), became a groundbreaking Broadway phenomenon much the way Hair did in the '60s or A Chorus Line did in the '70s.

It brought out both traditional theatergoers, people curious about Larson's centennial reworking of Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, and Larson's contemporaries (and those much younger), many with no interest in mainstream Broadway fare. In the process, Rent began changing the face of American theater.

Larson did it by taking Rent beyond Puccini's model, drawing from Henri Murger's gritty source material, Scenes de la Vie de Bohème (Scenes from the Bohemian Life), and from the lives of his friends, his generation and his own life to piece together his story about poor artists. Boiling his show down to its essence during the end stage of a seven-year creative process, Larson said, "Rent is about a community celebrating life in the face of death and AIDS at the turn of the century."

He populated the stage with the HIV-positive drug users and those who could give them compassion; straight, gay and bisexual characters; street performers and yuppies; a passionate exotic dancer and an angelic transvestite. Larson composed music that was lush, aching, melodic, blistering; wrote lyrics that were smart, touching, trendy. Rent is a world away from the singing nuns of traditional Broadway and the falling chandeliers of megamusicals, which is a huge part of its appeal to young audiences.

"Jonathan and I used to have great conversations about theater," said 33-year-old Rent producer Jeffrey Seller, who got to know Larson eight years ago after a performance of the composer's "rock monologue" tick, tick...BOOM!. "He felt that no one our age goes to the theater. Those aren't our stories, our songs, our characters."

Rent changed that. Seller estimates that half the Rent audience in New York is under 35. He knows teenagers who have seen the show 30 or 40 times, many by camping out in line for the $20 day-of-show front-row tickets (29 such tickets will be offered for each show during the Gleason run). Although older subscription audience members in tour cities sometimes walk out, turned off by the show's frank content, rock style and sheer volume, Seller said, "Lots of them get the gist of it. They love the energy. It's a little elixir of youth."

Long-term fans?

Given the long developmental process of most multimillion-dollar musicals, it's tough to say definitively whether the new young audiences lured by shows like Rent and Bring in 'Da Noise/Bring in 'Da Funk will get hooked on Broadway long-term, given their myriad other (read cheaper) entertainment options like movies, cable TV, concerts, and clubs.

Gregory Beals, who was once among Larson's ever-changing cast of roommates, wrote in Newsweek of younger people's disinterest in Broadway, noting that Larson ". . . was sometimes an odd man out in this world: He was as passionate about Broadway and his mentor, Stephen Sondheim, as he was about downtown. We went to a very hip East Village party one time, full of young filmmakers, actors, dancers, artists. When anyone asked what he did, he'd say, 'I'm making a rock opera for the '90s.' People just turned away. Finally he learned to say he was a rock songwriter."

But Larson, a man who grew up with rockers like Elton John and Billy Joel as well as Sondheim as his models, knew that great rock songwriting alone wouldn't cut it on Broadway. He believed that pop songwriters like Paul Simon and Randy Newman would have problems crossing over; in Simon's case, with this season's disastrous Capeman, Larson proved prophetic.

As he told writer John Istel for a piece published in American Theatre magazine: ". . . it's almost going backward to have a musical that is songwriter-generated because of the traps they can fall into. They're used to a number of things: not collaborating, not making changes and writing in their own voice. There's so much that Rodgers and Hammerstein and Sondheim have taught us about how to advance plot and character and theme in a song. Contemporary pop writers know how to write a verse and a chorus, 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.''

Doubled young audience

Larson did what Simon could not, and the payoff has been significant.

A recent League of American Theatres and Producers study found that the Broadway audience under age 18 has more than doubled, from 500,000 in 1991 to 1.1 million in 1997. Besides Rent, shows like the hip Noise/Funk, The Who's Tommy and even Jekyll & Hyde, with its durable pop-rock score by former Hollywood (Fla.) resident Frank Wildhorn, have fueled the younger audience boom. What gets to younger ticketbuyers, the League study shows, are all things Rent does well: enthusiastic word of mouth, powerful ad campaigns (Rent has a stark, hip, graphic-driven look) and affordable prices (Rent has both $20 and $35 tickets, though it has just pushed its top weekend price to a record $80).

"When I'm on a college campus, in a high school or even a junior high, the kids know Rent, and know it by heart," said James Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop and a man who helped guide Larson through his show's developmental process. "Now, when we do a show like Shopping and F**king, we get an audience we wouldn't have seen before. When we do a show that reflects younger peoples' lives, they're ready to come and listen.

"Rent and Noise/Funk happening the same season on Broadway promised a lot of new energy and new ways of doing things. I think the forces of power and money on Broadway are more open now to doing unconventional material and taking it seriously . . . I do think Jonathan had the possibility of redefining a Broadway tradition. I don't think that interested Savion [Glover, the talent behind Noise/Funk], but it rang Jonathan's bell.''

Everything about Rent, it seems, has transcended the norm.

Its young stars, many of whom came from the rock world rather than theater, have graced magazine covers and fashion spreads. Bloomingdale's in New York had a Rent-inspired shop so popular that the store brought it back twice. The show won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama, the '96 Tony Awards for best musical, best score and best book (script), and a raft of other honors. David Geffen did the cast album for Dreamworks, and after debuting at No. 17 on the Billboard Top 100 charts, the platinum CD has sold more than 550,000 units. Robert De Niro's Tribeca Films and Miramax have purchased the film rights to Rent, and the show has spun off touring, Canadian and London companies. Like many shows these days, it is touting itself via its own Web site (http://www.siteforrent.com).

All in all, Rent has been phenomenal. Yet tragically, it wasn't just Larson's breakthrough. It is his legacy.

"When I think about Jonathan, I'm always reminded of the fact that we were all young people without money who wanted to make theater our livelihood,'' said Seller. "It all happened. I made a lot of money. Jonathan's estate has made a lot. But he didn't get to come along.''

Larson never realized that his prophecy about merging theater and rock in a way that would appeal to the MTV generation had come true. In the wee hours of Jan. 25, 1996, several hours after the final dress rehearsal of Rent at the New York Theatre Workshop ended, Larson died of an aortic aneurysm while alone in his apartment of a dozen years, a poor composer's rundown creative haven at 508 Greenwich St.

That night, instead of the scheduled first performance of Rent, the cast did a "sing-through" in memory of its creator. At the end, after the applause, with everyone grieving and marveling at the work they'd just heard, someone exclaimed, "Thank you, Jonathan Larson." Larson's still-devastated parents, Al and Nan, had those words put on plaques that hang backstage wherever Rent is performed, so the actors can touch it before they go on.

Won over New York

When Rent finally had its formal opening on Feb. 13, 1996, New York's often stodgy, rock-loathing theater critics went crazy for it. The New York Times' Ben Brantley wrote: "Rent, the exhilarating, landmark rock opera, rushes forward on an electric current of emotion . . . It also shimmers with hope for the future of the American musical." Jack Kroll of Newsweek called it ". . . the breakthrough musical for the '90s."

Focusing on the show's creator, John Lahr of The New Yorker wrote: "Larson's talent and his big heart are impossible to miss. His songs spill over with feeling and ideas; his work is both juicy and haunting. By the end of the evening, Larson's talent has taken the audience to places where the musical, with its boulevard frivolity and its boulevard nihilism, never ventures these days."

Buoyed by a wave of similar reviews, Rent moved to the Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996, where it has been playing to more than 100 percent of capacity (counting standing room) every performance since. On April 4, it became the longest-running show ever to play the Nederlander (surpassing 1955's Inherit the Wind).

Al Larson remembers when he saw his son's workshop of Rent in 1994. "I saw for the first time the unity of what he had. I was blown away. I always thought it was my son's youthful hyperbole when he said he would bring the MTV generation into the theater. But he was confident. He knew what he was doing."