1996 Musicals - Rent, Canticle of the Plains, Whistle Down the Wind, Big: The Musical, Martin Guerre, Heathcliff, Bring in 'da Noise (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 20. Chapters: Rent, Canticle of the Plains, Whistle Down the Wind, Big: the musical, Martin Guerre, Heathcliff, Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk, State Fair, Floyd Collins, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, The Christmas Schooner. Excerpt: Rent (often stylized as RENT) is a rock musical with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La boheme. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York's Lower East Side in the thriving days of Bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS. The musical was first seen in a limited three-week workshop production at New York Theatre Workshop in 1994. This same New York City off-Broadway theatre was also the musical's initial home following its official January 25, 1996 opening. The show's creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly the night before the off-Broadway premiere. The show won a Pulitzer Prize, and the production was a hit. The musical moved to Broadway's larger Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996. On Broadway, Rent gained critical acclaim and won a Tony Award for Best Musical among other awards. The Broadway production closed on September 7, 2008, after a 12-year run and 5,124 performances, making it the ninth-longest-running Broadway show by that time, ten years behind The Phantom of the Opera as of December 2009. The production grossed over $280 million. The success of the show led to several national tours and numerous foreign productions, and in 2005, it was also adapted into a motion picture that features most of the original cast members. In 1988, playwright Billy Aronson wanted to create "a musical based on Puccini's La Boheme, in which the luscious splendor of Puccini's world would be replaced with the coarseness and noise of modern New York." In 1989 Jonathan Lar...