25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love virtual celebration marks 25th anniversary of groundbreaking Broadway musical abc7news.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from abc7news.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Wilson Jermaine Heredia won a Tony for playing Angel. There was no way the theater was ever going to go backwards after that, he said. You know it was going to be forever, forever changed, and it showed people a new perspective on how to tell stories.
Heredia was 23 years old and just a couple of years out of Hunter College when he auditioned for the show. He had no musical theater training whatsoever. I never saw anyone on Broadway that even looked like me, he said.
But the show, based on the opera La Boheme that was written in the 1890s, was set on the Lower East Side at the end of the 20th century and producers were looking far afield for new talent.
It s been 25 years since Jonathan Larson s
Rent burst onto the scene, forever changing the landscape of the American musical and ushering in a new generation of artists and theatergoers. If
you think that s hard to believe, imagine being Jim Nicola. Nicola is the longtime artistic director of New York Theatre Workshop, where Larson s seminal project debuted in 1996 following its author s tragic death and before taking Broadway by storm. He s spent the past several months enmeshed in the
Rent universe, something that he had not done for quite a while, to prepare for a silver celebration that kicks of tonight, March 2.
25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love virtual celebration marks 25th anniversary of groundbreaking Broadway musical abc13.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from abc13.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
February 22, 2021
Business was booming. Nearly 15 million people had seen Broadway shows during the 2018-19 season. The total box office gross was $1.8 billion. And as the calendar pages flipped to January 2020, every theater had been booked for what was expected to be a prosperous spring, with 21 productions scheduled to open between the first of the year and the late-April Tony Awards cut-off.
By Friday, March 13, that was all moot. The curtain had unceremoniously fallen the afternoon before by order of New York State, as cases of the novel coronavirus ravaged the city and rapidly filled hospitals beyond capacity. There were hundreds of different ways to have seen this eventuality coming audiences began to thin, whole companies and other theater personnel were getting sick but Broadway lives by one motto: The show must go on.