Seasons Of Love Why Rent Matters
My new book on Rent is truly one that could be measured in love. No (sane) person would have pursued it for anything but. However when it came to picking an extract to share on the blog, I struggled. None of it felt like it stood alone enough, none of it felt right in context. Truthfully too many people too will fight you on Rent given half a chance I wasn’t sure what to pick without the rest of the book to support it.
But, I’ve always said that while other plays I’ve written on are my head, Rent is my heart. So actually, the answer was simple, the conclusion where after five years of a PhD and some three years writing this book, I wrote about why Rent mattered to me. My heart show, from the heart maybe.
The dedication to the book is this, and this book is truly ours not mine.
CONCLUSION
HOW DO YOU MEASURE A LIFETIME IN RENT?
Most musical theater kids have a Rent story. Everyone who loves it— who really loves it—has their reasons why. I’m no different. I came late to musical theater. Aside from Andrew Lloyd Webber chart top- pers of the 1990s, musicals were not part of my world. But when I discovered Rent in college, it immediately became the center of my musical theater universe.
I bought the double-CD set of Rent at Indigo in Montreal. I first lis- tened to it perched on a crowded bus traveling down Sherbrooke trying to unsuccessfully stop my portable CD player from skipping. I spent months listening to that CD, cracking the case, scratching it on my tiny CD player and listening through laptop speakers. I was living thousands of miles from home for college, and my father died that Thanksgiving. No wonder a tale of love and loss captured my young heart.
We all have that moment when we knew this was part of our hearts. December 26, 2005 (you don’t know how much I wish it was Decem- ber 24), I saw Rent for the second time. I sat in the balcony, having convinced my mum to buy a second set of tickets that morning. Mid- way through “Will I?” something cracked open. In the theater, I cried like I never had before. It was then that I knew I was connected to the show forever.
My sense of Rent imposter syndrome is rife. I live on the wrong side of the world to be hanging around the Nederlander stage door, though I did manage it once. I lived in a country with a notoriously checkered past with producing this musical I loved. But I devoured content about it, living vicariously through the internet message boards. They were my window to Broadway and the world of Rent.
Rent wasn’t my first Broadway musical (that honor goes to Hugh Jackman and The Boy from Oz, incidentally another musical about AIDS), but it was the musical that made me a Broadway nerd. It’s the musical that made me dive deeper, follow actors, and seek out their shows. I might never have ventured beyond the TKTS booth if it wasn’t for Rent. Instead, I’ve found myself in basement rooms for concerts, traveling continents to see performers, and driving the length of the country to see the musical that started it all.
I didn’t know I needed Rent until much later. I’d never seen two men dance together or two women kiss before Rent. I’d never seen queer women happy in a story. I’d never seen queer women being kick-ass and brilliant and belting out a song that would be the soundtrack to my twenties. I had never seen a community that accepted queer people like the one Larson created onstage. I still see it on occasion, and because of this, Rent feels like coming “home.”\
I went on to create a career around my love for this show. I spent four years writing a PhD on Rent, defending my work every step of the way against supervisors who thought a musical wasn’t worthy and others at conferences who thought a musical couldn’t be used to talk about AIDS. Even when it was done, the section of my thesis about Rent was always taken less seriously than the section about Angels in America. I stand by what I said for all those years: Angels in America is my head, but Rent is my heart.
My relationship with Rent is now very much like that of a sibling. I bicker with it (sometimes out loud). I know all its faults and can point them out at length, but I won’t stand for anyone else coming for it. I know Rent is flawed and that it doesn’t stand up to our twenty-first- century analysis. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love it with my whole heart still. It gave us the generation of Broadway performers that passed through its doors and the generation of people who love Broadway. Rent raised us as a generation of theater nerds, and so much more.
Most musical theater kids have a Rent story. Everyone who loves it, who loves it, has their reasons why. For me, it was being a twenty-year-old on the bus desperately trying to get my CD Walkman to play “What You Own” without it skipping. Then it was Boxing Day—you don’t know how much I wish it was Christmas Eve—two months after my father died, sobbing like I never had before, and rarely have since, at a musical that felt like it reached out and fixed something in me. Look, it hardly takes a lot of work to figure out that, yes, a queer musical theater–loving teen loved Rent. But there was something about being part of a gener- ation that “the musical that defined a generation” changed, that stayed with us all. And Tick, Tick . . . Boom! became part of that generation— and that the original cast album of Tick show is engrained not only in my mind, but deep in my soul. More so even than Rent, perhaps. I learned everything I know about being a writer from Jonathan Larson and these songs. They are a part of me in a way that so few pieces of art are. They taught me about love when it was an abstract concept, and they taught me about being a writer before I was one. And I know instinctively I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Tick, Tick . . . Boom! occupies a particular place for the now thirty- somethings of musical theater. In the early 2000s, it was part of a sub- set, not quite yet one of the “classics,” not one of the big hitters, though we found our way there through Rent, of course. When we discovered Rent, we also discovered alternative musical theater. It was the era of Sh-K-Boom records, of Sherie Rene Scott, and Norbert Leo Butz in The Last Five Years. It was Songs for a New World and I Love You Because.
Later it was See What I Wanna See because Idina was in it. It was what- ever mix and match of those off-Broadway musicals you discussed on BroadwayWorld, or with your college friends. It was belting out “Come to Your Senses” or attempting to duet “Therapy” when you’d exhausted “Take Me or Leave Me.” It was crying along with “Louder than Words” in your bedroom and dreaming of doing what Jonathan did.
Tick, Tick . . . Boom! has always been a life raft in a different way than Rent. For me, for most of us, Rent is a place for the big feelings, the love, the loss of our teens and twenties, and beyond. It’s about finding yourself. Tick, Tick . . . Boom! is always been about something far more frightening: daring to dream.
It raised us. It was our beacon of “you can do this too.”
I don’t feel I would be the person I am without Jonathan Larson. I wouldn’t be the writer I am; I know that. We all have our Holy Trinities of people who make us write but, more importantly, keep us writing. For me, Larson is the core of that. He showed me stories that moved me in ways I didn’t understand then and gave me language for experiences I didn’t have words for. He gave me a style to emulate. And in a world where I am often “too much” or “too sentimental” or “not edgy enough” for theater, I look to Larson with his openhearted sincerity and conviction to write the stories he knew he had to, and I say over and over again, “that’s who I want to write like.” What Miranda gave us in Tick, Tick . . . Boom! is the man behind that and a reminder to write your stories, to make your art, however difficult it might be.
Larson gave me my love of Broadway—of musicals, yes—but also a particular love affair with New York theater that endures even now. The years of traveling across the Atlantic to seek out obscure shows, often purely because they had some connection to someone who was once in Rent, raised me as a baby theater nerd. The shows my love of Rent led me to shape my love of theater and my life.
My love of Larson’s work led me to write a PhD. My whole career and life as it looks now are literally because of Larson’s work.
With Tick, Tick . . . Boom! Larson gave me the words to be a writer. I first saw it live the summer I moved to London to do my master’s in theater. That moment of, “Yes, I’m going to jump in, I’m going to live this dream.” But also now, as someone who has not only passed the Tick, Tick . . . Boom! moment of turning thirty, but also passed the age Larson was when he died, there’s a question too of “Have I done enough?” but also the affirming nature of keeping going, of “cages or wings?”
I’ve watched everyone around my age do versions of Michael or Susan. Chasing the different dreams of security, family, and the “right time” to do things while I feel perpetually stranded between “Johnny Can’t Decide,” the “compromise or preserve” moments, and “Why,” and thinking “I want to spend my life this way,” always circling back to, “How do you know when it’s time to let go?” The lyrics of “Johnny Can’t Decide,” are both burned into my consciousness and ripped from my diary. That desperate need to create, do what you feel you are here to do, and deal with the push-pull of “Real Life.”
More than ever lately, I’ve found myself retreating into Larson’s words, not Rent, but in Tick, Tick . . . Boom! And for those times, I get to think, “Hey, what a way to spend a day,” having spent large portions of my time writing. In times of doubt, I remind myself, as Jonathan made that vow, “I’m gonna spend my life this way.” Because one thing we all took from Larson’s life was his tragic, untimely death and the
reminder that maybe we should lean into our art, whatever gifts we might have there, just in case there’s not that much time left.
In August 2021, I drove four hours to see Rent again at the Hope Mill Theatre with theater friends, the online friends we all made back in the days of Rent in the 1990s. I sat with one of my best friends (whom I wouldn’t know without musical theater). We had been apart for a year and a half thanks to another pandemic. During “I’ll Cover You (Reprise),” something cracked open again, and I sobbed on my friend’s shoulder as I had only done once before.
Larson gave me my love of Broadway and New York theater that endures even now. The years of traveling there, seeking out obscure shows because they had a connection to someone who was once in Rent, raised me as a baby theater nerd. Jonathan Larson was the foundation of my love for theater, and he made me a writer.
Yes, Rent was the future of musical theater, but more importantly, Jonathan Larson was the foundation of our love for theater, and for so many of us, he made us writers.
How do you measure a lifetime in Rent? How about 525,600 little connections, moments of beauty, people, songs, shows—and love?
The little show that took over the world gave me, time and time again, something to cling to when I needed it most.
Rent gave me a creator and artist to look up to, who helped shape my life and work.
Thank you, Jonathan Larson.