August 11, 2011: When it transferred to Broadway in 1996, trailing a Pulitzer and zooming toward multiple Tony wins, Jonathan Larson’s Rent was a revelation to some and a punch line to others. On the astonished side, you had many New York critics eager to champion a piece with the veneer of hipness and youthful urgency. Meanwhile, snickers and eyeball rolls came from people who had actually done the East Village thing: gone broke, made theater, got high and had their heart broken in a neighborhood that, by the early ’90s, was already the overpriced sandbox of trustafarians and NYU brats. The spectacle of cute bohemians belting power ballads about AIDS and art on the Great White Way seemed doubly commodified. When I finally caught up with Rent in 2001, I wanted to leave at intermission, feeling no compelling reason (narrativewise) to stay. Moreover, the rock portions of Larson’s score were overblown and phony, the characters whiny. But by then, it didn’t matter what I thought. Attended by endless hordes of Rentheads (did they actually visit the LES or just surge en masse to the Nederlander?), the show ran for 12 years before closing in 2008. Guess who had the last laugh?
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