Broadway Features and Reviews
Forget Regret: Confessions Of A Rent-Head
By Leora Kanner, Broadway Magazine
Rent, the revolutionary Broadway musical that opened in 1996, is scheduled to close on June 1st of this year. It will have had a long, successful, and important run on Broadway, and its presence on 41st street will be sorely missed.especially by Rent-heads, like myself, who count it as one their favorite Broadway shows.
Rent represents a new age of the American musical; it is an attempt to bring musical theatre to a younger audience in a way that few shows have done before. Rent brought to the Broadway stage sensitive subjects like AIDS and homosexuality, and the kind of music that had previously only been heard at concerts. The show not only embraced the youth of America in its themes, story line, and music, but the actors in it were mostly young and inexperienced as well. They symbolized the very people that the show meant to attract.
In an almost unprecedented fashion, Rent took Broadway by storm. It gained a cult following of young audience members; these "Rent-heads" were people who lived in downtown New York and identified with the characters they saw on stage. In a way that few other shows do, Rent almost necessitates one to not only see it once, but multiple times. Fans don't just like Rent, they are obsessed with it. There are even blogs on the internet in which people converse with the original cast, even now so many years after its opening. Rent is perhaps even more interesting for its almost legendary history; it's creator, Jonathan Larson, died the night the show opened off-Broadway. This twist of fate remains ironic, considering much of the content of the show deals with the premature death of young people.
The legacy of Rent is enormous; the show won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, The Obie Award, the Tony Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, all in the same year. In 2006, Rent was made into a movie starring the original cast. When it closes, it will have completed a 12-year run on Broadway, a feat that is rarely matched. It was one of the first shows to offer cheap tickets by lottery, an idea that was meant to open the show up to people that couldn't afford to attend Broadway shows. Perhaps most importantly, it spawned shows like Spring Awakening and Passing Strange, which also confront controversial themes that are relevant and appealing to non-traditional Broadway show audiences.
I first saw Rent when I was 16. I instantly became obsessed. Not only did I love the music from the show because it was music that I could listen to every day, but I fell in love with the characters. They were young, like myself, and had problems that seemed modern and realistic (even if they weren't exactly applicable to my own life.) The message of the show was clear and powerful and one that I use as my mantra..."forget regret, or life is yours to miss."
The true legacy of Rent is hard to comprehend, and its closing after 12 "seasons of love" is a major loss for Broadway. However, even in its absence, the impact that Rent has had on theatre is irrevocable. Few can argue that Broadway will ever be the same again. It definitely won't be for me.
