Dear friend,
RENT is a pillar of musical theatre history. When it premiered in 1996, it changed the face of New York theatre. Nothing had ever looked or sounded like it before. It had a full rock band onstage, a deconstructed set made of industrial scaffolding, and music that sounded like the 90s grunge rock playing on the radio. But its most stunning feature was its story. Based on La Boheme, Puccini’s lush Romantic opera about the tuberculosis epidemic, RENT offered a gritty and raw portrait of how AIDS ravaged NYC and particularly the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s.
As a queer New Yorker myself, it’s fascinating to see how the city has changed since the time of RENT — and how it hasn’t. The scars of the AIDS crisis subsist today. So many still struggle to fill the void left by loved ones lost. And in many ways, the fight isn’t over: AIDS still has no cure. But RENT is a story about how we cope; how we mourn; and how we eventually heal. Its characters are survivors, firm in their belief that “there is no future, there is no past.” To survive means to celebrate the lives of those we’ve lost and then to keep living, to hold tight to every precious second since any of them could be the last.
Jonathan Larson never lived to know the legacy his work would have: He died the morning of RENT’s first preview off-Broadway. He left behind RENT as a love letter and tribute to the East Village community he himself belonged to, but it grew into so much more. To this day, it remains a phenomenon — a beacon to young people who are dissatisfied with the system they live in and are burning to rage in pursuit of a more promising future. If life is “measured in love,” and not days, Jonathan Larson survives well beyond his final day on Earth, and will so long as his music continues to play.
Thank you so much for joining us, for sharing in this story, and for supporting Aspire and its community of passionate young artists. Enjoy the show!
With love, in every season,
Joey Nasta
Director
