Loading details…
Artist
Rent Musical
12+ albums
about
Rent is an American Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical, with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson. It debuted in New York City on February 13, 1996, at the New York Theatre Workshop before moving to Broadway, where it opened at the Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996. It is still playing there as the seventh-longest-running Broadway musical (as of October 2006). [citation needed] Based on Puccini's opera La bohème, the musical centers on a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York's Alphabet City in the early 1990s, under the shadow of AIDS. Rent was one of the first Broadway musicals to clearly feature gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgender characters. It is also noted for its ethnically diverse cast, which includes many racial minorities in its ensemble and leading roles. Rent is considered revolutionary for bringing controversial topics and counterculture to a traditionally conservative medium, and is credited with increasing the popularity of musical theater in the younger generation. Many critics have also mentioned how the show speaks to Generation X the same way that the musical HAIR spoke to those who grew up in the 1960s, calling it "a rock opera for our time, a Hair for the 90s." The cast album from the show was the most successful recording of an American musical in almost 30 years, [citation needed] featuring both a double-disc "complete recording" collection with a remixed version of the s
