Rent: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical (2 page)

The heroes Jonathan created kept trying to restore those hopes and dreams. And in pursuit of his own, he had developed good relationships with ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild, being invited to workshop his material.

But in 1986, nothing he could have imagined would have prepared him for the news that his childhood best friend, Matt O'Grady, was about to tell him when he arrived at the Moondance Diner and ordered a milk shake. Best friends since they were six, they had played on their tree-lined street and swum in the neighbors' pools. Matt's welcoming Irish Catholic family blended seamlessly with the liberal Jewish Larsons, and theirs were, perhaps, the only two families in White Plains to vote for George McGovern in 1972. They went to school together, and in high school, when Matt realized he was gay, the first person he told was Jonathan. Jon never judged, he listened and cared. So that day, when Matt settled in at the counter at the Moondance, as he often did for a visit with Jon, all seemed well. But Matt had news; he was HIV positive. For Jon, in that moment, HIV had gone from being in articles in the New York Times and the wrenching stories of friends' friends wasting away and dying from AIDS to looking into his best friend's eyes and praying that Matt would somehow survive. It was an apocalyptic disease. For the 28,712 people in the United States who had progressed from being HIV positive to having AIDS by 1986, 24,559 had died by year's end. Matt's diagnosis had a profound impact on Jonathan's life. It would accelerate everything, because, I believe, it started an invisible stopwatch. Time could run out.

By 1989, a year after Libyan terrorists had brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and medical waste had started washing up on the beaches of Long Island, people were listening to Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and trying the antidepressant Prozac. Jonathan had won several prestigious awards and grants for Superbia, but with each new draft, his hero's and heroine's outcomes diminished. In a late draft, his heroine chooses to electrocute herself by touching the wires inside her MT (media transmitter) and the hero decides not to save the world. Jon was frustrated with the progress of his career. He was about to turn thirty, was in a committed relationship with another beautiful dancer, Janet Charleston, and was still waiting tables at the Moondance Diner. And though, to Jonathan's relief, Matt O'Grady was doing well and his HIV had not progressed to AIDS, the number of reported AIDS cases had quadrupled to 117,508. One of those new cases was our good friend Alison Gertz. Ali's diagnosis and the discovery that she had become infected when she was sixteen from a single sexual encounter with a boyfriend became international news. At twenty-two she became the new face of AIDS. It was the year the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil onto the shores of Alaska and hundreds, if not thousands, of young people were killed during student protests in China's Tiananmen Square. Jon needed to say something, and though he had written many political cabarets for Adelphi University, he was anxious to start work on a new show that would create a platform for the many social issues that troubled him.

That summer, Ira Weitzman, the musical theatre program director of Playwrights Horizons (the nonprofit theatre where Sondheim would develop many of his shows and Jonathan had received a workshop of Superbia), recommended Jonathan to playwright Billy Aronson, who was interested in creating a modern musical based on Puccini's La Boheme. After listening to some of Jonathan's music, they agreed to meet.

Billy arrived at Jon's place on Greenwich Street shortly before dusk. Since there was no doorbell, he called from the pay phone on the corner and Jon threw down the keys. Billy made his way through the smudged halls, up the three flights of rickety stairs to meet Jon in his kitchen, which had a large four-legged bathtub in the center of it. They got some lemonade and seltzer and climbed a steep ladder to the roof. Overlooking the Hudson River, as the lights of the prison barge appeared (New York had run out of space for its more violent offenders), Billy, sitting on a crate, shared his own frustrations and fears about the arts and theatre and life.

They agreed to work together and eventually wrote first drafts of the songs "Rent," "Santa Fe," and "I Should Tell You." They were both excited by the feel of the pieces and the vibrancy of the music. Jon suggested the title Rent and reminded Billy of its other definition: to tear apart with force or violence, an apt metaphor for the turmoil in the community they were describing. From that first meeting, Jon had strong ideas about many aspects of the show that exist in its final form, from the East Village location to the drug addiction of Mimi, and most importantly, that she lives. He felt very strongly that the show was about celebrating life. And as he and Billy continued to work into November, when the Berlin Wall fell and trumpeted the beginning of the end of the Cold War, it seemed that there may well be things to celebrate. The reinventing of a great classic like Puccini's La Boheme, based on Henri Murger's book Scenes de la Vie Boheme, with tuberculoses in Paris in the 1800s being replaced with AIDS in New York City at the end of the twentieth century, was the canvas Jon's creativity had been longing for. But as Billy and he continued to try to work through the story, with both of them new to collaborating, they found their essentially different writing styles were at odds. After a few months of working together, they recorded a demo of the first three songs and decided to pursue different projects individually.

There was another reason that Jon took a step away from Rent. He was anxious about creating another large-scale musical that producers would shy away from. For five years, including that past September with a well-attended concert version at the Village Gate, he had heard that Superbia, with its large cast and futuristic sets, would be dauntingly expensive to produce. Jonathan wanted to pare down his next show. The New Year arrived, and his thirtieth birthday was celebrated with a surprise party I threw at our friend Pam Shaw's landlady's West Village brownstone (what we couldn't provide ourselves, we borrowed!). Though Matt and many of his closest friends attended, our friend Gordon couldn't. He had been admitted to the hospital that week. At 6 feet 7 inches, the usually robust and stylish Gordon, who had worked on the costumes for the recent Superbia concert, was on a respirator, being fed through a tube in his nose, and was paralyzed from the neck down. He had a rare ailment unusual in a healthy twenty-eight-year-old, so the doctors asked him to take an HIV test. By the time they informed him that he had full-blown AIDS two weeks later, he was a skeletal 127 pounds. He was unable to speak for the first three months of his diagnosis. He was one of the 160,969 cases of AIDS reported in the United States by the end of 1990.

Jonathan, who was very emotionally connected to his friends and surroundings, set to work on a new form of musical, a "rock monologue" that he would perform himself with a four-piece band. He had been inspired by the personal and political monologues of Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray and the performance pieces of Laurie Anderson. He would write a multi-titled piece he would eventually call tick, tick ... BOOM! that would tell the very semiautobiographical story of a composer named Jonathan during the week of his thirtieth birthday, exploring his fear that he would never fulfill his dream of "being the future of the American musical" and examining how his life changes when he learns that his best friend is HIV positive. Ultimately, the character Jonathan is empowered to try to change the world through his writing.

Jon and I staged a small production of tick, tick ... BOOM! at the Second Stage Theatre and several workshops for a young producer named Jeffrey Seller, but we were finding it as difficult to get a theatrical production for this much leaner show as we'd had with Superbia. In a last-ditch attempt, we hoped to launch a successful ongoing run at the Village Gate in November 1991. We had raised some money (much of it our own) and were paying a band to perform with Jonathan. On a cold Wednesday night, I arrived at the Night Owl Studios on West 30th Street during the first, and only, full-band rehearsal with Jonathan and our director, Pippin Parker. I avoided eye contact with Jonathan and called Pippin out of the room. I was weak and distressed and didn't know what to do; Pamela Shaw, whom I had known since I was six and Jon had dated, had just found out that she had AIDS. We could hear Jon singing through the studio door. He sounded amazing as he sang a wrenching version of "Why," about his friendship with Matt. Pippin and I agreed that I should not tell him until after opening night. This was not only shocking news but meant that Jonathan had been exposed to the virus and needed to be tested himself.

The opening was well attended and Jon was glad to be performing again. After a celebratory late-night dinner, I walked him back to the edge of SoHo and joined him for what he thought would be a nightcap to discuss the evening's events. I told Jon to sit down.

I told him that Pam had been tested for HIV because of a minor infection in her mouth. I told him that she was HIV positive, and though she appeared perfectly healthy, she had six of the 1,000- plus T cells per microliter that a healthy person has and essentially had no immune system, and therefore she had AIDS. I told him that he needed to be tested. Jonathan was speechless. He was truly shaken by Pam's diagnosis and as frightened as anyone would be to find out that they have been exposed to the deadly virus. In a few weeks, he was relieved to find out he was HIV negative, but it was no time to celebrate. The grim reality that four of our best friends were infected with HIV, and three of them had developed AIDS, changed everything in our lives. Jon hosted a peasants feast every year-a giant potluck holiday meal for his artist friends and extended family-and that year each toast filled our eyes with tears.

That fall, Jonathan asked Billy Aronson for permission to proceed with Rent on his own. Permission was granted. And from that time on, Jon threw himself into Rent, a canvas large enough to honor his friends and to raise awareness about AIDS and the social injustices he saw every day. As he would proclaim in his song "La Vie Boheme," "the opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation."

That is what Jonathan did, he created Rent, and everything he felt and feared and celebrated is in this libretto. And it is filled with his love, too. In the early hours of January 25, 1996, after the final dress rehearsal for Rent at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, elated and exhausted, Jonathan made his way home. He died, alone in his apartment, from a dissecting aortic aneurysm that doctors in two hospital emergency rooms had failed to detect. He never knew that Rent would indeed change the American musical theatre. But I know he would be proud that it did.

Cast and Credits

RENT

Book, Music, and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson

Directed by Michael Greif

Rent was originally produced in New York by New York Theatre Workshop and on Broadway by Jeffrey Seller, Kevin McCollum, Allan S. Gordon, and New York Theatre Workshop.

Original Broadway Performance

Cast in order of appearance:

ROGER DAVIS

Adam Pascal

MARK COHEN

Anthony Rapp

TOM COLLINS

Jesse L. Martin

BENJAMIN COFFIN III

Taye Diggs

JOANNE JEFFERSON

Fredi Walker

ANGEL DUMOTT SCHUNARD

Wilson Jermaine Heredia

MIMI MARQUEZ

Daphne Rubin-Vega

MAUREEN JOHNSON

Idina Menzel

MARK'S MOM AND OTHERS

Kristen Lee Kelly

MR. JEFFERSON, SOLOIST #2, CAROLER, A PASTOR, AND OTHERS

Byron Utley

MRS. JEFFERSON, SOLOIST #1, WOMAN WITH BAGS, AND OTHERS

Gwen Stewart

GORDON, THE MAN, MR. GREY, AND OTHERS

Timothy Britten Parker

STEVE, MAN WITH SQUEEGEE, A WAITER, AND OTHERS

Gilles Chiasson

PAUL, POLICE OFFICER, AND OTHERS

Rodney Hicks

ALEXI DARLING, ROGER'S MOM, AND OTHERS

Aiko Nakasone

Understudies

Yassmin Alers, Darius de Haas, Shelly Dickinson, Norbert Leo Butz, Mark Setlock, and Shayna Steele

Set Design

Paul Clay

Costume Design

Angela Wendt

Lighting Design

Blake Burba

Sound Design

Kurt Fischer

Original Concept and Additional Lyrics

Billy Aronson

Musical Arrangements

Steve Skinner

Publicity

Richard Kornberg and Don Summa

Casting

Bernard Telsey Casting

Technical Supervision

Unitech Productions, Inc.

General Management

Emanuel Azenberg and John Corker

Production Stage Manager

John Vivian

Music Supervision and Additional Arrangements

Tim Weil

Choreography

Marlies Yearby

Dramaturg

Lynn M. Thomson

The Band:

Conductor, Piano, and Synthesizers

Tim Weil

Bass

Steve Mack

Guitars

Kenny Brescia

Drums and Percussion

Jeff Potter

Keyboards and Guitars

Daniel A. Weiss

Musical Numbers

Act One