Rent
Missoula
January 26, 2024
07:30 PM
Since its Broadway debut in 1996, this story of love, friendship and a pandemic is still relevant today. Winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the late Jonathan Larson’s Rent has become a cultural phenomenon that shaped a generation. Loosely based on Puccini’s opera La Bohème, Rent is a rock musical set in the 1990s in New York City’s East Village. This story of “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll”, which is recommended for audience members 17+, has some very powerful and positive messages about living for today and measuring life in love (“Seasons of Love”), but the darker shadows of the AIDS epidemic, drug addiction, and the gentrification of Alphabet City loom over this group of young artists as they struggle to survive. Will these friends – a documentary filmmaker looking for his story, a musician trying to write one last song (“One Song Glory”), a stripper with a secret, an anarchist professor, an activist actress, a liberal lawyer, and a drumming drag queen be able to make the rent and still keep living “La Vie Bohème”? Experience the power of living in no day but today (“Another Day”).
