Rent is one of the most successful musicals of Broadway, where it has run for twelve years. Its premiere in 1996 at the Nederlander Theatre, was accompanied by a fatal outcome: a week before its author the New Yorker Jonathan Larson died of an aortic aneurysm.
Based on the opera La Bohème of Giacomo Puccini, it recounts a year in the life of a group of young artists trying to survive in New York in the early nineties, all under the shadow of AIDS and characters who, for the first time in a musical, presented themselves openly gay and bisexual. It won four Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1996.
