When did the sea change? When did RENT go from something we could all agree about (so brilliant!) to something we can all agree about (ugh, cringeworthy)? Maybe people hate on RENT now because we want to demonstrate how much we’ve grown, because backlash always sets in when a cultural property goes mainstream (and especially when it gets made into a painfully mediocre movie). It wasn’t embarrassing yet to be caught humming their duet “Take Me, Baby, Or Leave Me.” Of course, it wasn’t embarrassing yet to hang an Ani DiFranco poster on your dorm room wall, either. Though we dreamed of being Maureen, the charismatic performance artist, we were all, we agreed ruefully, Joanne, the dowdy lawyer. When I got to college, I bonded with other first-years over RENT. Both Hard Copy and Prime Time Live did stories on the show. They appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, The Charlie Rose Show, and The Tonight Show, and sang “Seasons of Love” at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. The cast soon found themselves in The New York Times, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s Bazaar. The New York Times called it an “exhilarating, landmark rock opera,” and said it “shimmers with hope for the future of the American musical.” Time magazine called it “the most exuberant and original American musical to come along this decade.” The Wall Street Journal called it “the best new musical since the 1950s.” On opening night, the performance began with Anthony Rapp, who played Mark, dedicating the show to the memory of Jonathan Larson. … The same melodrama that appealed to me appealed to millions of others, teenagers and establishment critics alike.Īccording to one in-depth history, when RENT opened in 1996:

Nor, for that matter, was I alone in swooning over Titanic.

The key thing is that I was not alone in swearing my allegiance to Jonathan Larson’s gritty but ultimately life-affirming show. (One of the only others is feigned disaffection. Passion is one of the only accepted currencies in high school. Adolescents are not, after all, famous for their thoughtful, moderate opinions. In this respect, I was a typical teenager. My fifteen-year-old self did not merely own the soundtrack (on cassette tape and then on CD) she knew all the words to all the songs by heart and spent an inexcusable amount of time crying alternately over that show or the movie Titanic. Perhaps you noticed that I recently made fun of RENT, which I will do these days with the slightest provocation and for which my fifteen-year-old self will never forgive me. The original cast of RENT is reuniting in celebration of the show’s 20th anniversary. RENT, 20 Years Later: Why We Groan About The Show We Once Loved RIP, Life Cafe

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