Rent

The day before Rent opened in Off-Broadway previews in 1996, the musical’s creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly at age 35 of an aortic dissection. Although Jonathan Larson died on the evening of the final dress rehearsal, his breakthrough musical, his career continued through posthumous development of his earlier works, both onstage and in film. He wrote his first musical, Sacrimmoralinority (1981), later retitled Saved!—An Immoral Musical on the Moral Majority (1982), while he was a student at Adelphi University. After graduating, he wrote Superbia (1984), a science-fictional musical that was performed at Playwrights Horizons and won the Richard Rodgers Production Award and the Richard Rodgers Development Grant but was never fully produced. In 1986, the AIDS crisis became personal for Larson when his best friend since childhood, Matt O’Grady, shared that he was HIV positive. Within Larson’s group of six close friends, four were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, including Alison Gertz, who became a nationally known AIDS activist at 22 by drawing attention to the fact that she didn’t fit the stereotypical profile as a straight woman who didn’t use drugs and contracted HIV from a single sexual encounter at 16. Before she died at 26, she used her diagnosis to spread the word that AIDS can occur in anyone.