If my generation has a musical, and this being the 21st Century it probably doesn’t, it would be RENT, Jonathan Larson’ s milestone 1996 update of La Boheme. Almost unique in contemporary American society RENT actually captured the popular imagination, at least as much as Broadway show can. The first musical since A Chorus Line to appear on the cover a weekly Newsmagazine (the Newsweek cover proclaimed: “RENT STRIKES: A sexy hit for the 90’s electrifies Broadway!”) RENT was a smash hit and a cultural landmark.  The winner of the Tony and the Pulitzer, RENT went on to become the seventh longest show in the history of Broadway.  So vital and immediate was its story that the show produced a whole counter-culture of its own…a small army of young teenage RENT-heads who went to the theatre in near perpetuity, as if attending some obligating sacred ritual.  Winning the $20 lottery (an innovation now de rigueur on the Great White Way) was akin to striking gold, for then you got to sit in the front row -- all but participating in the show yourself. Most of these fans were not the broke and diseased East Village Bohemians portrayed onstage but rather middle class suburban youth who felt some strange kinship with the characters; for once, a musical was speaking to them and not to their parents. While the show has had its ups (the 10th anniversary concert, the national tours and London productions) and downs (Joey Fatone playing Mark, the exhaustingly literal Chris Columbus film) it has remained a fixture on Broadway and a temple for young theatre fans to congregate and worship.  With the recent announcement that the show is closing on Broadway after a twelve year run, I think it appropriate to look back at RENT’s legacy as a cultural phenomenon, for RENT was as much about its political and sociological preoccupations as it was about its melodramatic plots and subplots.  

RENT was dated almost as soon as it opened.  Such is the way with art that seeks to represent, to epitomize, the immediacy of its social reality. Just as the characters of Hair supplanted the real hippies in the collective memory, so to did the Bohemians of RENT distill the actual world in which they lived to become the very manifestations of that world for future generations.  The early '90s were a moment of flux for theatre, New York, and America. A democrat was in the White House, a digital revolution that no one could predict was looming on the horizon, a city known for urban squalor was about to morph into a tourist amusement park, and a terrifying epidemic was entering a new and very different phase.    

RENT represented, though no one knew it at the time, the end of a decade long trend in the New York Theatre: The story of AIDS.  The hermetic theatrical community in New York (it all happens on a small island after all) and the overwhelming tidal wave of disaster that AIDS brought to that community left a library of potent plays in its wake. It’s a collection of works that, looked at as a whole, form a shockingly coherent and disturbing narrative. Best chronicled, without intention to do so, by Frank Rich in his anthology of stage reviews from the 1980s called Hot Seat, the call and response between real life events and theatrical treatments of them has never been more pronounced. Amazingly, almost as soon as a “gay plague” began to take hold amongst a few Christopher St. residents there were shows chronicling the soon-to-be pandemic.  Early works like As-Is (1985) even made it to Broadway at a time when President Reagan still hadn’t uttered the word AIDS in public.  Larry Kramer presented the political crucible of the disease with vehement fervor in his documentary-like, loosely autobiographical play, The Normal Heart.  A stinging indictment of the city of New York, its apathetic (and probably gay) Mayor, and the still closeted, self-hating gay community, The Normal Heart was nothing less than a battle cry from the gay communities most rancorous pugilist.  Reading the play now is to understand the trauma and social turmoil that enveloped a decade.     

Other plays came and went but the real apotheosis of the era, and the appropriate final review in Frank Rich’s book, was Tony Kushner’s Angels In America -- a play that used AIDS to key into far grander metaphorical and ideological issues.  Angels was a play of its time to be sure, but from the specificity of its problems came, with Kushner’s genius, a timeless work of art.   It must have felt like the end of journey for the audience.  Almost a decade had gone by and the AIDS crisis had transformed from a disease threatening a small enclave of promiscuous gay men, to a national crisis that had, by the time Angels opened, fundamentally changed the way disease and homosexuality were thought of in America.  And all of it had been presented, in real time, on the stages of New York. 

Musical Theatre was bound to have its say too. With the success of La Cage Aux Folles in 1984, it looked like gays were finally being accepted in popular entertainment, at least among the Bridge and Tunnel crowd.  The show about a loving and aging gay couple ran over 1000 performances on Broadway and nabbed the Tony for Best Musical.  Just when this breakthrough occurred, the party ended.  The first Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids Benefit was, not coincidentally, performed on the La Cage stage. It was very clear, very quickly that representations of gay people in musical theatre would have to incorporate this new crisis. 

RENT was not actually the first Broadway musical to deal with AIDS. Falsettos by William Finn has that distinction; for the first time figuring out a way to have songs about what for so long was simply unspeakable.  But Falsettos was a continuation of the '80s narrative, written by a middle aged gay man who lived through it.  It spoke to an audience that could remember a world without AIDS; a time when the disease didn’t color the political and social context of homosexuality.  RENT was something else altogether.   For the first time AIDS was woven into the overall tapestry of life, its existence taken as a given and, though often difficult and heartbreaking, it was no longer a mysterious and hysterical crisis. AIDS was, instead, a fact of modern metropolitan life.  RENT also reflected the disease's victims outside the gay community: the story’s main heterosexual lovers are infected, both from intravenous drug use. Their moment of deep emotional connection occurs when she announces that she needs to take her “AZT-break,” informing him for the first time that she too has HIV.  The widening sphere of those infected by HIV would be one of Larson’s most prescient observations.  So too would his lyric about “people living with, living with, living with, not dying from disease.”  Though the term “drug cocktail” probably had yet to be coined, with the widening availability of AZT, AIDS, for the first time, began to be a disease that one could possibly survive.  Fatalistic inevitability, dramatized so powerfully in Falsettos’s “You Gotta Die Sometime,” had given way to cautious hope and affirmations to “forget regret, or life is yours to miss.”  To a generation that had never known a time when AIDS didn’t exist, such positive mantras were greeted with open arms.  The story of AIDS, as told on the New York stage, had reached its dénouement.  Though more plays have been and no doubt will be written on the subject, the narrative now is a new one-forged as it was out of the blood, sweat and tears of these brave playwrights and composers past.    

Equally enticing for the youth audience was the sympathetic love that RENT showed for all its characters, HIV-infected or otherwise.  Viewed abstractly, RENT has the kind of Dramatis Personae that Pat Robertson might concoct when he imagines the sinful denizens who inhabit particular enclaves in Lower Manhattan or San Francisco’s Castro.  Larson loves and humanizes these “degenerates” -- drag queens and slutty lesbians, junkie musicians and self-important artists.  Even the homeless, in a somewhat muddled attempt at social commentary, are treated with respect.  Beyond crude biographical sketches, the characters in RENT are actually quite surprising. Though the show seems to portray the cultures extreme sterotypical fringe, the representations themselves are relentlessly P.C.  The African-American characters are uniformly the financially successful, upwardly mobile roles: they are the philosophy professors, the corporate lawyers, even the would-be yacht club “WASPS.”  Larson does not even mention their race within the libretto.  In the depths of bohemia, it seems race does not exist. A conceit that, while somewhat preposterous, resonated with a generation that grew up in the post-civil rights world where it was taught race does not matter.  The political correctness went beyond racial issues; the gay characters were all played by straight actors while Mark, the straight Jewish narrator (a stand in perhaps for Larson who was both straight and Jewish), was played by the gay and very out Anthony Rapp. Yes, it was a post-race, post-sexuality world now; it was the 90’s after all.    

But the East Village of RENT was coming to an end just as the show was reaching its biggest fame.  Indeed, RENT was written as a eulogy of sorts. It was a farewell to, not just the fatalism surrounding AIDS and the legacy of homophobia but also, far more regrettably, to the Bohemian world in which Larson lived.  Gentrification was all but inevitable by the time RENT opened; the East Village home no longer to starving artists and street musicians, but instead hedge fund brokers and dot-com entrepreneurs.  This was Giuliani’s New York, scrubbed clean and tourist friendly. Even RENT’s theatre, the dilapidated Nederlander, became a parody of itself, a theme park simulacrum of an older, tougher Times Square. In the show’s most brilliant moment the cast sings a raucous, joyous defense of their social and geographic niche even as they see it transforming into a world of social inertness and artistic banality. “La Vie Boheme” is Larson’s lyrical masterpiece, a dense and witty onslaught of words and references worthy of W.S. Gilbert. Yes, East Village Bohemia was already dead by the time RENT opened on Broadway, but Larson preserved its spirit, its progressive politics, its pseudo-intellectual preoccupations and its ultimately loving glow. 

The world of never really existed anyway, downtown’s residents never were quite as colorful and cuddly as Larson writes them. Instead, like any great artist, he made that rose-colored world real.  Like the opera it’s based on, RENT is, in the last analysis, a big treacly tearjerker, seen through the lens of a fantasy Urban New York.  Its too-sweet sentimentality made palatable by its “edgy” characters and hip, icy staging. RENT let people (especially ironic, prematurely jaded young people) feel good about themselves and the world. They didn’t even have to have any guilt about it. It was Larson’s big heart and not his tragic death that made the show the landmark it was -- in its own way, RENT was as optimistic a show as Oklahoma! It will forever speak to people who dream of RENT’s Bohemia, not as a place somewhere south of Union Square in the 1990s, but as an ideal to live by no matter the time or location. “How do you measure a year?” RENT asks. After twelve Seasons of Love, I’ll be sad to have to find another way.