REINVENTING BROADWAY |
RENT, the most
exuberant and orignial American musical to come along in a decade, has single-handedly
reinvigorated Broadway and is taking the country by storm. Sweeping all major
theatre awards, RENT captures the heart and spirit of a generation. Inspired by
Puccini's La Boheme, RENT is a joyous, breathtaking and often heartbreaking musical
that celebrates a community of artists as they struggle with the soaring hopes and tough
realities of today's world. The life-affirming message of RENT has been made all the
more poignant by the sudden death of its creator, Jonathan Larson, just hours before
RENT's first performance.
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| There's a scene in the musical "Rent" that may be
the quintessential rockmantic moment of the 90's. Roger, a struggling rock musician,
and Mimi, a junkie who's a dancer at an S/M club, are having a lovers' quarrel when their
beepers go off and each takes out a bottle of pills. It's the signal for an "AZT
break," and suddenly they realize that they're both HIV-positive. Clinch. Love duet. If you don't think this is romantic, consider that Jonathan Larson's sensational musical is inspired by Puccini's opera "La Boheme," in which the lovers Mimi and Rodolfo are tragically separated by her death from tuberculosis. Different age, different plague. Larson has updated Puccini's end-of-the 19th-century Left Bank bohemians to end-of-the-20th-century struggling artists in New York's East Village. His rousing, moving, scathingly funny show, performed by a cast of youthful unknowns with explosive talent and staggering energy, has brought a shocking jolt of creative juice to Broadway. |
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