by Damien Jaques
Journal Sentinel
October 13, 2000

"Seeking raw, original singers who truly have a quality of street life and move well. Authentic people. Not seeking the typical musical theater performer."

The above notice, printed in the trade publication Back Stage last month, was a casting call for replacement performers for "Rent." It also serves as a primer for anyone who may not be familiar with the wildly successful musical that came out of nowhere in 1996 to win a Tony, a Pulitzer and the intense devotion of legions of young fans.

Some quick history: "Rent" borrows heavily from Puccini's well-known, 104-year-old opera "La Boheme," a tale of young, anti-establishment artists living and dying as paupers in Paris. Unknown composer Jonathan Larson updated the story and characters to a tough and gritty section of lower Manhattan and wrote a rock 'n' roll score that reflects the plot and neighborhood.

The consumption that threatened the lives of the young people in Puccini's opera was replaced by the modern plague, AIDS. A filmmaker, a performance artist, a drag queen and a lesbian lawyer were some of the characters in the new version.

The show's drama became real and tragic when the 35-year-old Larson, who had worked on "Rent" for seven years while employed in a diner, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm after watching the final dress rehearsal of his musical. The show's opening in an 150-seat, out-of-the-way off-Broadway theater was emotional and explosive.

Overnight, "Rent" became New York's hottest theater ticket, a phenomenon that did not fade when it was moved uptown to the much larger Nederlander Theatre on Broadway. The show is still doing well there.

A national touring company of "Rent" played Milwaukee a year and a half ago, and now it's back, booked at the Riverside Theatre, beginning Tuesday.

Unlike some of the characters in his show, Larson was not infected with HIV and did not follow an alternative lifestyle. But he lived in the tenements, among the druggies, artists and counterculture young people, in Manhattan's Alphabet City, pursuing his own struggle for artistic success.

His futuristic rock musical "Superbia" was praised when it was presented in a workshop setting, but Larson couldn't find a producer who would risk money on it for a commercial production. So he kept on writing in his free time and working at the Moondance Diner, where he made a great milkshake, according to New York Times theater critic Bruce Weber.

In one of those odd coincidences of life, Weber frequently ate at the Moondance, and he got to know Larson long before anyone had ever heard of 'Rent."

"He was a sweet-tempered young man with an easy, respectful manner," the critic recalled in a piece he wrote about "Rent" this summer.

But Larson was becoming frustrated as he toiled in low-paid obscurity and his birthdays hit 30. That was obvious in "Tick . . . Tick . . . Boom," a rock monologue he wrote and performed at New York's Village Gate, a well-known Greenwich Village club. Jeffrey Seller, a young man looking to make his mark as a producer, was in the audience one night and was so impressed with Larson, he told the composer-performer that he wanted to work with him.

They became friends, and with fellow producers Kevin McCollum and Alan Gordon, Seller obtained the rights to move "Rent" from the non-profit New York Theater Workshop to Broadway and beyond. Hit productions of the musical were staged this summer in Dublin, Ireland and Seoul, Korea, adding to the list of productions that have been mounted around the globe.

Larson's family has directed some of the money his estate receives from the show to a foundation that is awarding modest grants to up-and-coming musical theater composers, lyricists and librettists.

Larson's father told the New York Daily News last year, "We figure there's a lot of theatrical people in the same rocky boat that Jonathan used to be in."

Staying with a tradition that began when "Rent" first transferred to Broadway, selected seats in the first several rows of the orchestra section of the Riverside Theatre will be sold for $20 on the day of performance, two hours before curtain time. There is a limit of two tickets per person, and purchases must be made with cash.