Rent

Jonathan Larson’s exuberant East Village rock version of Puccini’s opera La Bohème won the Tony Award for Best Musical as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Larson’s stirring and life-affirming score captures the heart and spirit of a generation of struggling artists, addicts, and impoverished young people living in the shadow of AIDS, battling the coming wave of gentrification.

A time capsule of a world where hope crawls out of dark despair, these Bohemians find the salvation of love within each other and prove there can be a better world where art thrives, and everything good is free.

RENT was revived twice in London, over the Christmas seasons of 2001 and 2002 at the Prince of Wales Theatre and in 2007 at the Duke of Yorks in a remixed version. Over the course of the production’s 12-year engagement on Broadway, which ended on September 8 2008, there will have been more than 5,000 performances, making Rent the seventh-longest-running Broadway show in history.