The Tony Award-winning musical Rent premiered in 1996.
At the time, it was a new rock musical by little-known author Jonathan Larson, performed in a small off-Broadway theater.
But nearly 30 years later, director Marisa Hebert is hoping to re-enjoy audiences by retelling the story that became an internationally acclaimed musical.
“I always keep in mind that if something is more than 20 years old, you're allowed to change the concept,” Hebert said. “Toward that, I gave the designers a very clear path. I said, 'Let's take everything we know about 'Rent' and break it up.” We don't want people coming in thinking they're going to get the same “rent” as they were in the early to mid-1990s. So we really worked on the concept of telling the story of RENT, but forcing it into a different visual that people weren't used to. ”
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center will open Thursday night and perform “Rent” throughout May. The story, loosely based on Puccini's La Bohème, follows a group of young artists struggling to survive on New York's Lower East Side in the shadow of the 1990s HIV/AIDS crisis. Masu. Featuring a cast of couples, the characters overcome love, loss, and grief.
“I've loved this show forever, and directing this show was just a big, long love story about the last few weeks of my life, the cast, the team, and the music.” “I spend eight hours a day listening to incredible music with incredible people. I feel like it's a gift,” Ebert said.
In directing the show, Ebert did a lot of research into creating musicals and documentaries about the AIDS crisis. Hébert said the raw nature of the activity inspired the play's direction.
“It felt very similar to the feel of graphic novels today, where you tell a story pane by pane,” Ebert says. “I kind of went down the rabbit hole of what would happen if I took Rent and put it into a graphic novel?” And that's what I told the design team. …So we actually took some liberties to make it feel more like a graphic version of Rent than an operatic or industrial version. ”
Overall, Hébert wants to tell a story of community and love.
“I especially hope that viewers don't see this as a queer story, or a brown story, or a story about drugs, but instead just see it as a community of people who found each other and created a family of their own. And everything else. Despite this, we chose to love each other,” Hebert said.