Jonathan Larson, Life & Death, And Rent

  

"525,600 minutes, how do you measure a year in your life?" these are the lines from Broadway’s ninth-longest running show Rent, which Jonathan Larson originally intended to be symbolically performed on Angel’s death but the cast sang it at the opening of the musical as Larson had died just hours before the show’s first preview at a New York’s off-Broadway theatre in 1996. Playwright, lyricist, and composer, Jonathan Larson was the man behind the celebrated rock musical “Rent” which ran for straight 12 years on Broadway, but sadly didn’t live to see the success of his musical stroke of genius as he passed away on January 25, 1996, ten days before his 36th birthday. A graduate of Adelphi University, New York, Larson was influenced by Elton John and the American rock band, “The Doors” in his early years. Larson rose to prominence with his autobiographical rock monologue, Tick, Tick… Boom! which was later adapted into a film and released by Netflix in 2001. Coming back to “Rent” which made Larson one of the biggest names on Broadway and won him the Pulitzer award for Drama, at the outset was a brainchild of the playwright “Billy Aaronson” who approached Larson with his idea of re-making Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème where the Bohemian splendor would be swapped with the noisy, harsh lifestyle of modern New York (90’s), Larson proposed the title and suggested to set the play in East Village neighborhood of Manhattan(which happened to be down the road from his apartment) amid poverty, drug abuse, HIV/Aids (updated from La Bohème’s Tuberculosis plague), urban stress and struggling characters unable to pay rent. Rent follows the life of penniless artists tortured and harassed by urban pressures as they make personal discoveries about life not much different than how Larson was himself living to make ends meet, sharing a room with friends and working as a waiter at Moondance Diner. Larson lived like the people he wrote about, the set of the “Rent” was his apartment and the characters, his life. Just when everything came together, and “Rent” was set to premiere, Larson missed the chance to bask in any of its glory, the 35-year old collapsed in his apartment and his body was found on the floor of the kitchen, he died of an aortic aneurysm on the very day of the Rent's first off-Broadway preview performance. His chest pains and dizziness were misdiagnosed as influenza or food poisoning by Cabrini Medical Centre and St. Vincent’s Hospital. The next day at New York Theatre Workshop, the Rent premiered as scheduled but without costumes, it ended up with huge applause and then a dead silence only to be finally broken when someone from the audience shouted out, ‘Thank you, Jonathan Larson’.