Rent's creator died the night before its first preview
Jonathan Larson spent years waiting tables while writing Rent, a rock musical that reset Puccini's La bohème among struggling artists in New York's East Village during the AIDS crisis. He died suddenly on the morning of its first off-Broadway preview. The show went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and run twelve years on Broadway.
The idea began with someone else. In 1988 playwright Billy Aronson wanted to swap the lush world of La bohème for the grit and noise of modern New York, and in 1989 Larson, then a 29-year-old composer, joined him. Larson proposed the East Village setting and the title, and together they wrote early songs including the title number. In 1991 Larson asked to take the concept over as his own, agreeing that Aronson would share in any Broadway earnings and be credited for the original concept and additional lyrics. Larson's dream was a rock opera that would bring musical theatre to the MTV generation.
He supported himself working at the Moondance Diner and wrote hundreds of songs, cutting and rewriting until the final version had 42. When New York Theatre Workshop gave it a first reading in March 1993, it showed strong material but a show that was too long and tangled. Workshop versions tried numbers later dropped or rebuilt, such as a song in which the landlord urges the filmmaker Mark to give up film and sell real estate.
On 24 January 1996, after the final dress rehearsal, Larson gave his first and only newspaper interview, to Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times, who was intrigued that the show opened a century after Puccini's opera. Early the next morning Larson died of an undiagnosed aortic dissection, believed linked to Marfan syndrome. Friends and family gathered at the theatre, and the first preview became a sing-through in his memory.
Rave reviews and the story of his death packed the 150-seat theatre for every performance, and the show moved to Broadway's Nederlander Theatre on 29 April 1996. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, grossed more than $280 million, and closed on 7 September 2008 as one of Broadway's longest runs. A 2005 film reunited six of the eight original principal cast members.
Source: Rent (musical)
