SEASONS OF LOVE
Why Rent Matters
by Emily Garside
Applause. 320 pages, $29.95
SEASONS OF LOVE is a wide-ranging discussion of the hit musical Rent by Emily Garside, a British researcher and playwright. The story of composer Jonathan Larson, who died of a brain aneurysm on the night of the final dress rehearsal for its Broadway opening in 1996, has become part of the story of Rent, which had a twelve-year run and over 5,000 performances.
Garside finds subtly queer implications in La Bohème as well as in Rent. The character of Angel, who is gay and who dies in Rent, seems to be based on Schaunard in La Bohème, whose sexuality is not clearly identified but who sings in a falsetto voice. In this way, according to Garside, Larson represented marginalized characters in pre-millennial New York while remaining true (in his fashion) to one of the “classic” literary sources.
The “Schulman case” against Rent is more controversial. Lesbian writer and activist Sarah Schulman claimed that some of the characters in Rent were based on those in her novel People in Trouble, and that Larson commodified the AIDS crisis in New York to make a buck. Garside refers to a 1998 editorial in The Guardian by British columnist Joanna Coles, who complained that Rent is an appropriation of struggles that Larson had not experienced firsthand. Garside concedes that Larson, a straight white man, may have had greater access to the movers and shakers of the theater world, notably Stephen Sondheim, than did Schulman, and this may have enabled him to launch the musical on an Off-Broadway stage that would otherwise have been out of reach.
Seasons of Love traces the influence of Rent on theatrical productions with LGBT elements since 1996 and on composers such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, who directed Tick, Tick… Boom!, a film about Larson’s efforts to create a musical earlier in his career. While skeptics doubted that Rent, with its very specific setting, could do well in London in 1998, or in Manchester in 2021, it has had a life of its own in the U.K. Critics have noted that Rent was still something of a work in progress when it opened in 1996, but it has been largely preserved without revision because of its composer’s untimely death, and it has had numerous revivals in the 28 intervening years.
Jean Roberta is a widely published writer based in Regina, Canada.
