A bidding war began for the right to produce the $240,000 show on Broadway. Immediately, the six-week run at the 150-seat East Village theater was extended through March 31 and sold out. It took seven years of arguments, workshops and worry, but that show, "Rent," finally opened last month at New York Theater Workshop to some of the most glowing reviews of the last decade.
He wanted to "blast people out with a grisly, messy show," as he told Mr. He wanted to set the play in the East Village, amid poverty, homelessness, spunky gay life, drag queens and punk. Larson had been shaken by friends who were dealing with a stigmatized fatal illness that especially preyed on the poor and the young. He was living it - from the grungy Greenwich Street apartment with a four-legged relic of a bathtub dominating the kitchen, to the dynamic street life of artists, immigrants, addicts and hippie holdouts in the neighborhood, to his circle of friends who shared clothes, money and sometimes lovers.īut more than that, like Puccini's characters, Mr. He didn't know "La Boheme" beyond a puppet version he had seen as a child. The time had come to reclaim Broadway from stagnation and empty spectacle, he said, "to bring musical theater to the MTV generation."
Larson immediately envisioned a gritty, uplifting show that could be his breakthrough work - " 'Hair' for the 90's," he unabashedly predicted. Aronson thought there were rich and ironic parallels between Puccini's lyrical tale of boisterous Left Bank bohemians in 1830's Paris and the struggles of young urban artists today.Įxcited by the possibilities, Mr. Aronson was proposing an enticing concept for a show: a contemporary American musical version of Puccini's "Boheme." An opera buff who could just afford standing-room tickets at the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Larson was getting fed up with waiting on tables at the Moondance Diner in SoHo and making demonstration tapes of himself performing his own songs in an endless effort to secure a backer. But the show was too big, too negative no producer was ready to take it on.
His music and lyrics had won high praise among some downtown theater people. His futuristic rock musical, "Superbia," had been performed in a workshop at Playwrights Horizons. Larson's favorite thirst quencher: lemonade made from cheap concentrate and seltzer.īut the composer with the sad brown eyes and goofy grin was nursing frustration and hurt. Larson was sitting in a dilapidated lawn chair on the roof of his ramshackle walk-up on the outskirts of Greenwich Village, talking with Billy Aronson, a young playwright he had recently met. Jonathan Larson's rock musical "Rent" was conceived seven years ago on a sticky summer night.
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