The evolution of the musical RENT is not a simple one. It took seven long and difficult years to take the show from its initial concept to its first public performance. The story of RENT is filled with highs and lows of the most epic proportions. For every burst of applause and prestigious award, there is the reminder that its creator is not here to share in its glory. In fact, it was only one week before Rent's first preview that Jonathan Larson felt the first thump of the aortic aneurysm that would take him away. Director Michael Greif and the cast were rehearsing "What You Own" - the rousing second act show-stopper about dying at the end of the millennium - when Jonathan Larson collapsed and asked for an ambulance. He later told friends that he couldn't believe that the last burst of music he would hear might be his own song about dying.
An ambulance took Jonathan to the hospital, and he was diagnosed with food poisoning. A few days later, after another incident, doctors at a second hospital said he had the flu. On January 25, 1996, Jonathan - weary but excited - went to the final dress rehearsal of RENT at the New York Theatre Workshop. By the end of the show, Jonathan was surrounded by friends and supporters shouting in approval and stamping their feet. After the ovations subsided, he was interviewed by a reporter from The New York Times. The reporter told Jonathan, off-the-record, that RENT was an amazing achievement, destined for success. Then he went home, put on some tea, and died. His roommate found him on the floor of the kitchen, beside his coat. Jonathan Larson was 35 years old.
You know what happened to the play next - the show has become one of the biggest things ever on Broadway. It's become the sort of thing a playwright dreams about in the middle of the night, and in the morning is embarrassed at how wild he's let his fantasies run. RENT - Jon's first produced show - is like an athlete who has won the Rookie of the year award, an Olympic gold medal, the World Series, and the Most Valuable Player Award, all in the same season. It has collected the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, The Obie Award, the Tony Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Rent was on the cover of Newsweek. Time called it a "breakthrough," The New York Times "an exhilarating landmark." At the 1996 Democratic National Convention, the cast of Rent sang "Seasons of Love." Movie and television stars have returned again and again, and afterwards, at the Nederlander Theater, they've gone backstage to sign a long brick wall - Mel Gibson and Janet Jackson and Jodie Foster --forwarding their best wishes and congratulations to Jonathan and the cast. People in the show say they recognize the same audience members coming back to the Nederlander ten, fifteen times. Over the past few years, RENT has played to cheering fans throughout North America. In fact, it has become a global phenomenon, packing houses in England, Japan, Australia, Germany and countless other countries. If a young playwright told you this was a fantasy of his, you'd smile at his ambition, and he'd walk away embarrassed. But here it is true.
There would be no RENT, of course, without Jonathan Larson. However, there are other voices too, artists and producers and actors who helped shape RENT and gave it sets and lights, flesh and bones. If you've ever wanted the inside scoop on RENT, you've come to the right site. Here's how it happened:
In the beginning, there was Billy Aronson, a Yale-trained playwright who loved opera and had an idea: Billy wanted to write a musical updating of La Boheme. He wanted the show to be about people like himself - struggling to make art under lousy conditions. Some theatrical acquaintances suggested he work with Jonathan. In 1989, they met and swapped ideas. Jon came up with the title: RENT. He didn't like Billy's proposed Upper West Side setting; Jon lived a bohemian life downtown. He rented a scruffy loft that had a bathtub in the kitchen. For a while, he and his roommates kept an illegal, wood-burning stove. He dated a dancer for four years who sometimes left him for other men and finally left him for another woman. Jon wanted to write about his experience. In 1991, he called Billy and asked if he could make RENT his own, and Billy agreed.
New York Theatre Workshop put on a reading of Rent in the spring of 1993. Some thought it was simply ragged, but others were in love with the material, no matter its flaws. A young producer named Jeffrey Seller, who had met Jonathan several years earlier, felt the time was right to produce a musical. He had stayed in touch with Jon, because he was convinced that one day, "Jon was going to write a brilliant musical." When Jeffrey first saw the show, he felt the play was baggy, a collage with no narrative shape. "There were great songs," Jeffery remembers, "but there were endless songs." Jeffrey was still interested - as long as Jon found a story as compelling as the music.
Jon sent a letter to Stephen Sondheim, his mentor, asking for advice and assistance. The older composer responded by encouraging Jonathan to apply for a Richard Rodgers foundation grant. Jonathan eventually won $45,000 to support a workshop production of RENT.
What they needed now was a director. Jim Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, immediately suggested Michael Greif, a young New York director who had recently become artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. Greif listened to a tape of RENT on a Walkman flying from California to New York. The script seemed shaggy. "What impressed me," he remembers, "was its youth and enthusiasm, and that it was a musical about contemporary life. Jon was writing about some people I felt I knew, that I sort of loved, or had loved in my life." What Jim wanted in a director was a counterweight to Jon's eternally positive outlook, which had allowed him to treat dark subjects like AIDS, homelessness, and drug addiction with optimism. Michael was hard-nosed and cool-headed. He met with Jim and Jonathan in January of 1994, and the three set to work on bringing the script to the level of the music. "It was very fragile material at the time," Jim recalls. "And it was so easy for it to become sentimental or hokey. I felt Michael had the right sort of dryness and sharpness to balance Jonathan's writing."
Jim saw that his instincts were right when the three got down to shaping the script in Jon's loft. They met for a week in the middle of the spring, preparing for the workshop scheduled for November. They went over the script scene by scene, moment by moment. Immediately, the dynamic between Jonathan and Michael slipped into a productive yin and yang. Michael was afraid there was something self-congratulatory about the young bohemian heroes of the show; so Jon toned down the lyrics of "La Vie Bohème." Michael fretted about the homeless characters - that they not simply serve as East Village window dressing, as moral scarecrows where Mark and Roger could drape their good social conscience; so Jonathan wrote the new song, "On the Street," where a homeless woman gives Mark a stern telling off. Most importantly, Michael had reservations about the message of the show, the "No Day But Today" cheerfulness of the life support meetings. Michael had friends with HIV, just as Jon did, and they were not cheerful about it. Jon added the scene of Gordon questioning the life support credo, saying he regretted his low T-cell count. And Jon himself kept Michael from becoming too hard-nosed and cool-headed. Anthony Rapp, who originated the role of Mark, remembers, "what Jon gave Michael was some of his hope and heart and generosity of spirit. And what I think Michael gave Jon was some edge and realism and complexity, and making sure things didn't all resolve nicely and prettily. It was a good marriage."
That summer, Michael and Jon talked plot. One large problem, they agreed was the relationship between Maureen and Mark; in these drafts, a major plot point was Mark winning Maureen back. Michael didn't like it. "My position was, if they're gonna be lesbians, let them be lesbians. Don't make them about going-back-to-their-man." In October, Michael worked out the "performance vocabulary" of RENT. For budgetary reasons - and also because it suited the nature of the characters - the NYTW decided to have minimal props. Michael suggested the three "Frankenstein" tables, which could be used to serve multiple functions in the show. He pushed for a multiracial cast. Because it was rock, Michael played around with microphones, with actors singing directly to the seats: "We were very anxious to take advantage of the fact that it would be as much a concert as it was a play."
For all of its flaws, the November workshop was a tremendous success. It ran two weeks with the audience growing larger and more enthusiastic each night; by the last week it was sold out. Anthony Rapp, remembers the excitement: "I kept telling people it was going to be an event. We knew it needed work. But people I trust and respect - friends and collaborators - would come down and be knocked out by it.
Jim Nicola thought it needed work, too. But the responses he was getting from his friends were just what Anthony was hearing. "There was a lot of passion - again, the most striking thing was the intensity of opinion about it. There was a large segment of people whose tastes I trusted who just loved it, and didn't care what the problems were. I felt even more convinced that there was really something strong here." Jim found himself moving towards an exciting, scary, stirring decision: "RENT was the kind of show to bet the company on."
During the workshop's second week, Jeffrey Seller returned to East Fourth Street. This time, he brought his business partner, Kevin McCollum. Sitting down in the front row, seeing the three tables, remembering the plotless show he'd seen a year earlier, Jeffrey had time for a crisis of confidence. He turned to Kevin before the show and warned him, "this is either gonna be absolutely brilliant or it's going to be a mess." At intermission, Kevin nudged Jeffrey and said, "I'm loving this. Get out the checkbook."
A few nights later, they brought a business associate named Allan S. Gordon to the NYTW. The three had worked together previously on the national tour of "The Real Live Brady Bunch." Allan was equally enthusiastic - like Jeffrey and Kevin, he was overpowered by the music. That night, the three decided to join forces with New York Theater Workshop to bring the show to fruition.
After the holidays, Jim, Michael and Jonathan sat down again in Jim's office. Jim had thought it over, and talked to NYTW's board members. The Workshop decided to stage a full production of Rent the following year with the help of Seller, McCollum and Gordon, who would get the commercial rights in return. The budget would be $250,000 - twice the cost of anything NYTW had ever mounted.
They spoke about what needed fixing. The show had no single story, no primary narrator - in the November workshop, all the characters told the story; when they had something to say, they turned around and said it right to the audience. And the characters themselves, especially Maureen and Joanne, needed refinement. Jim gave Jon a task: Could he boil the plot down to a single sentence? The sentences Jon first turned in were impossibly long, crammed full of clauses, parentheses and second thoughts. But as Jim anticipated, as the sentences came into focus, so did the play.
Jim decided to hire a dramaturg to work with Jonathan. Dramaturgs work with playwrights as critics, advisers and editors. Jon did a lot of interviews before meeting Lynn Thompson. Lynn seemed to be on Jon's wavelength, and they hit it off right away. She was able to speak in a voice that sparked Jon's enthusiasm. Jim put the two on a schedule; Jon would deliver a revised draft by summer's end. RENT was to begin rehearsals in the fall.
Jon had found another strong collaborator. Lynn suggested he work up biographies of the characters, that he write a version of RENT told through each person's eyes. Her belief was that once Jon understood the story completely, once he really had the characters under his belt, the rewriting of the play would come in a simple burst. They worked through the summer, discovering a structure for RENT.
By October, Jon had a new draft; he was confident his six years of work were over. Actors read the script aloud to everyone. Jim and Michael were pleased with many of the changes, but they knew they weren't out of the woods. The characters were sharper, but Jon had done some structural fiddling, turning much of the show into flashback. The first act began with Angel's funeral and Mark wondering, "How did we get here?," with the rest of the story catching up from there. No one was comfortable with this except the playwright himself. The Maureen-Joanne relationship was finally working, but their second act duet was by all accounts miserable. "One of the worst songs ever written," Michael remembers with a laugh. "The song was a straight out cat fight, the lovers sniping at each other, Maureen telling Joanne, 'You're the hepatitis in my clam.'"
Jeffrey was also concerned. The show was supposed to go into rehearsals in six weeks and Rent didn't feel ready to him. "On the one hand, the new script made a huge, wonderful leap from the workshop - a gigantic creative stride - but it wasn't there yet. Now it's late October and we're in casting. And the show starts rehearsing in December." Jeffrey dashed off some quick, blunt notes on what he felt needed to be changed in RENT before the production could move ahead.
Jeffrey's notes were intended for Jim and Michael, but somehow Jon got a hold of them. What the notes called for was another rewrite. Jon didn't want to do any more writing. "There was real terror the production wouldn't happen," Michael remembers. "It was a tense few days. Jon was very upset and very frustrated. But we all wanted this show to be as strong as it could be." Jon turned to Sondheim one last time, and Sondheim reminded him of a key proposition: theater is collaborative. Part of Jon's job was to take into account what his collaborators felt. So Jon signed on.
Michael wanted a simplified structure, with a clearer emotional division between the two acts: "The first act should be much more the celebration, and the second act should reflect the ramifications and sorrows surrounding these lives." Jon finally quit his job at the Moondance Diner. His friend Eddie Rosenstein remembers, "After he left the diner, and he announced that he was a full-time professional musical playwright, his spirits soared. That's all anybody wants to do in life, isn't it? A chance to do what they do."
During Jon's rewrites the show moved into casting. Michael wanted a youthful, sexy cast. He and Jon leaned toward young performers who seemed to have some connection with their characters, whose spirit could add dimensions to the work. The cast seemed to invigorate Jon. "He was really inspired by this company," Michael says. "We still needed the Joanne-Maureen song. And Jon really wisely said, 'let me just sit with these actors, and let me bring you something.' And then what he brings me is 'Take Me or Leave Me,' and I'm totally thrilled out of my mind."
In December, with casting done and rehearsals about to begin, Jon handed in the final version of RENT. Jon had worked a succession of 20 hour days. "He had completely cleaned up the narrative," Jeffrey says, remembering everyone's excitement with the last creative step. And Jon finally delivered to Jim his one-sentence summary of what story Rent told: "RENT is about a community celebrating life, in the face of death and AIDS, at the turn of the century."
From December on, it was a quick sprint to the show you've seen. There were a lot of what Jon called "programming changes": shifting songs from one position to another, seeing where they fit best. In January, Jim watched a rehearsal with a group of NYTW board members, and the emotional response to RENT was extraordinary. "It continued to get even tighter and better through rehearsals," Daphne Rubin-Vega, the original Mimi, remembers. The New York Times got wind that a rock musical based on La Bohème was going to premiere on the 100th anniversary of the original La Bohème. No one had known this; it was a fluke. The night of the final dress rehearsal, Jon was sick with a sore chest and a fever. Still, he took a taxi to Fourth Street, watched the show, and sat for his interview with the Times. The last thing Michael and Jim remember saying to him was to take it easy and sleep well. Jon died an hour later.
After Jon's death, there were a few revisions. Lynn, Jim and Michael and musical director/arranger Tim Weil (who would take charge of the show's musical elements after Jonathan died) would meet and attempt to decide what changes Jonathan would have approved. When the show premiered, they knew they had something special on their hands. Jon's death added an explosive, powerful element to the cast's understanding of the play. "The company had already come together so well, but the event of Jon dying just brought us together that much more strongly," Daphne remembers. "It let us remember that the bottom line is really about what you do with this experience, because tomorrow isn't promised you. There was no more powerful way of receiving that message than from someone who was completely healthy and died. Someone whose life was just beginning."
The day of Jon's death, no one at the Workshop was quite sure what to do. The first performance was scheduled for that evening. Jim Nicola's first inclination was to cancel, but he knew they needed to do something for Jonathan's memory. The first act, in particular, involved a lot of tricky dancing and jumping on tables. It hadn't been completely rehearsed, and he was afraid there would be injuries. That evening, New York Theatre workshop was filled to capacity with people Jon had loved - friends, family and colleagues. Jim decided on a sing-through - no movement, just songs. Throughout the first act, the cast was able to hold their seats. But very slowly, they began to rise. They acted, they danced. "It was incredible and terrible," Anthony remembers. "It was like we had to do it. We were all sobbing and crying." The lighting people made their way to the lighting booth; the sound manager began to pick up his cues. "They couldn't contain themselves," Eddie remembers.
"The audience was reaching out to the cast. They were crying and cheering. By the second act, it was no longer contained. It was the full show run full-out. If emotion could have become a physical force, the roof would have blown off, the weather would have changed." The second act ended. There was a huge ovation, the cast slowly left the stage, and the audience stayed in the theater. No one was sure what to do. The cast returned and sat down in the front row. Finally, a single voice called from the audience, "Thank you, Jonathan Larson," which brought the evening's loudest, final burst of applause.
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