The cross-dressing Angel (Aaron Alcaraz) celebrates joy to the world as only he can — dressed to the nines, drumsticks in hand and ready to dance. Angel is the beating heart of the close-knit band of artists/friends in Jonathan Larson’s Rent.
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contradictory. He was shaken by his lack of professional success but confident of his talent. (He once broke up with a woman because she said he couldn’t write an authentic gospel song.) He came from a comfortable suburban home but s relished his ragtag lifestyle. He expected musical theater to be literate, bracing and up to date. To Larson, a friend recalled at his memorial, “Stephen Sondheim was God; Jerry Herman was the devil.” The idea for Rent was suggested to Larson by a young playwright named Billy Aronson, who’s still credited with the lyrics to “Santa Fe,” “La Vie Bohème” and “I Should Tell You.” Aronson wearied of the project, but Larson carried on — for seven years. He envisioned a Hair for the 1990s.
Rent’s six-week offBroadway run at the 150-seat New York Theatre Workshop sold out. It was extended, and sold out again. A bidding war began for the right to produce the $240,000 show on Broadway. It reopened April 29 at the Nederlander Theatre with a budget of more than $2 million. Tony Award nominations seemed inevitable. Record deals were being discussed. Larson, of course, wasn’t there to see it. But his friends were. “Every night we got up on the stage, and we had one responsibility,” Idina Menzel recalls on Live: Barefoot at the Symphony, her 2012 CD. “That was to communicate Jonathan’s music, his work and his story. He taught us to try to live in the moment.”