A darkly serious twist on Puccini's La Bohème set in the "outsider" enclaves of Manhattan's contemporary bohemia, the Lower East Side, Rent has emerged from the theatrical netherworld of art-for-art's-sake workshops to become a must-see phenomenon. The show not only raked in $5 million in advance sales before its Broadway opening on April 29, it also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, only the seventh musical ever to do so--an honor made all the more dramatic by the fact that Rent's creator, the 35-year-old author-composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson, cannot receive it. On Jan. 25, when Rent was no more than an experiment scheduled for a limited Off Broadway run, Larson watched the final dress rehearsal, went home, and died unexpectedly of an aortic aneurysm.

"He wrote the play as a response to a lot of friends' deaths," says director Michael Greif. "It resounds as it does because it's a very honest affirmation of life in the face of death."

Rent had its genesis seven years ago, at the suggestion of playwright-lyricist Billy Aronson. Aronson had an amusing, ironic show in mind, but Larson (interested in the impact of AIDS upon friends) wanted one more realistic and hard-hitting. Larson took sole charge of the project in 1991, though some of Aronson's lyrics remain in two songs, "I Should Tell You" and "Santa Fe," and he receives program credit and financial compensation.

For the next five years, Larson worked and reworked the show. Rent evolved via staged readings and productions at the New York Theatre Workshop, gradually attaining greater power. If the focus remained somewhat imprecise, that was by design: Larson wanted a postmodern show as bustling, jumbled, and untidy as life. In the script, he called for a set that would appear "more like a pile of junk than a set," adding "The entire play should seem thrown together out of this junk."

Larson's summary of Rent's daring, elliptical plot filled two and a half pages. Mark (Anthony Rapp), a struggling filmmaker whose girlfriend has left him for a woman (as one of Larson's had), and Roger (Adam Pascal), a rock musician whose girlfriend has committed suicide after learning they were HIV-positive, are threatened with eviction from an abandoned East Village building. Mimi (Daphne Rubin-Vega), a drug addict, strives to reimmerse the emotionally benumbed Roger in life. Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin), a teacher, falls in love with Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), a drag queen. But in Rent, Larson has done more than tell what happens to certain individuals; he depicts a whole community of outsiders with rare and startling vividness.

There are not happy endings for all of these folks. The threat of early death--we're reminded of it even by beepers prompting characters to take their AZT--is ever present. But so is an urgency to squeeze as much as possible into what time remains. The show is carried along by that urgency, erupting in a climactic, defining, first-act-capping song, "La Vie Bohème." With near-violent energy, the words are hurled at us: "Emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion/Creation, vacation, mucho masturbation/Compassion, to fashion, to passion when it's new/To Sontag, to Sondheim, to anything taboo..."

Larson's melodic outpourings are more consistently impressive than his lyrics. Though many of the lines are adroit, some feel like first drafts("Who do you think you are?/Leaving me alone with my guitar"). But at their best, Larson's songs--aimed more for the heart than those of his rather cerebral idol, Stephen Sondheim--are gloriously overbrimming with life. (The original cast CD is being recorded by David Geffen's DreamWorks label.)

Rent is a landmark not because it's a rock musical--there have been others since Hair in 1967, mostly undistinguished--but because its whole sensibility, not just the music, is of the moment. Larson may not have been commercially oriented. But Rent's phenomenal success may embolden producers to risk other musicals by young people and about their world. And in the insular industry of Broadway, that would be something really big.