'Rent' Strikes

Entertainment Weekly
1997 Yearbook
By J. Cochran

It all happened fast. First, on Jan. 25, 35-year-old composer Jonathan Larson died of an aortic aneurysm. The next day, Rent, his edgy poperetta based on La Boheme, debuted Off-Broadway. Then came the gushing reviews, the buzz, the April Broadway transfer. Before anyone knew what had happened, Rent was the hottest ticket in America. On the backstage walls of the Nederlander Theatre, Rent's celebrity graffiti accumulated faster than its raves ("You are all amazing!" Lauren Bacall scribbed). While tap scion Savion Glover pounded Broadway into the Urban Age on April 25 with Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, Rent led the way with prizes: the Tony, an Obie, the Pulitzer. DreamWorks recorded a cast album, Bloomingdale's rushed out a line of Rent-inspired thrift-shop-like fashions, and Miramax inked a reported $2.5-5 million movie deal. Musicals had returned. "People can identify with it, and I suppose that's what Okalhoma! did when it came out," says Rent star (and Newsweek cover girl) Daphne Rubin-Vega, who got a Mercury Records deal and, like all the original cast, a cut of the show's profits. Just a few months after Rent hit Broadway, Larson's final project came out: a cowritten kids' video. Its title, Away We Go!, may seem trivial, but Larson took cues from musical's Golden Age: That was also the original name of a show called Oklahoma!