Musical Today
Cut-paper illustration: a zigzag fire escape on a brick tenement, with a single candle burning on a windowsill.

Rent

What Rent actually is

It follows a year in the lives of a group of friends in New York's East Village around 1990 — a filmmaker, a songwriter, a dancer, a performance artist and the people who love them — while HIV and AIDS, poverty and an eviction bear down on them. It is a loose retelling of Puccini's La Bohème.

Larson wrote the book, the music and the lyrics. “Seasons of Love”, with its 525,600 minutes, is the song everybody knows.

Gaten Matarazzo plays Mark, with Travis Ross as Roger, Alexa Lopez as Mimi and Lazy Violet as Maureen; Tom Jackson Greaves choreographs. The theatre recommends it for ages 14 and up, with content warnings for HIV and AIDS, suicide, drug use and strobe lighting.