LINCROFT: THIS SPACE FOR ‘RENT’
RENT is going up again, as Brookdale’s Performing Arts Center presents a homegrown production of Jonathan Larson’s game-changing musical beginning this Friday.
It won a Best Musical Tony and a Pulitzer Prize; ran for a dozen years on Broadway; has single-handedly been credited with reinventing the modern American musical — and has spawned a legion of followers who’ve been branded everything from “the most passionate” to “the most annoying” of fanbases.
It’s Rent, Jonathan Larson’s magnum opus (set in the once-forgotten but fast-transitioning landscape of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the AIDS-ravaged end of the 20th century) that borrowed the framework of Puccini’s La Boheme — and that became a genuinely game-changing Broadway sleeper, fueled by real grass-roots buzz, burgeoning social media, and the mind-bogglingly sudden death of its creator on the eve of the show’s first preview.