Thirty years after Rent opened on Broadway, Idina Menzel, Taye Diggs, Anthony Rapp and the rest of the original cast lined up across a Broadway stage again to sing “Seasons of Love,” and the clip is a lot to handle before your morning coffee.
They had company. Neil Patrick Harris, Aaron Tveit, Rachel Zegler and more than 60 performers from three decades of the show turned up, including two men who once played Angel on Broadway: My So-Called Life star Wilson Cruz and original Queer Eye Fab Five member Jai Rodriguez. The original Angel, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, got an entrance of his own, 30 years after the role won him a Tony.
And every dollar went to the cause Rent was written about.
One Night Only, One Long Line Across The Stage
Rent, the 30th Anniversary Concert played the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Monday, October 26. Tickets went on sale June 1 and sold out almost immediately, so Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS added a $30 livestream that stayed up until 11 PM ET on Tuesday.
The returning original company included Idina (Maureen), Anthony (Mark), Adam Pascal (Roger), Daphne Rubin-Vega (Mimi), Wilson (Angel), Taye (Benny) and Fredi Walker-Browne (Joanne), plus a long list of the original ensemble. Michael Greif, who directed the 1996 production, directed again, and original music supervisor Tim Weil led a band with three members of the original pit in it.
Anthony showed up in a black-and-white striped scarf. If you wore out the cast album as a teenager, you know exactly whose scarf that is.
The set wasn’t theirs, either. The Richard Rodgers is home to Hamilton, so the cast sang in front of that show’s wooden scaffolding. Anthony counts Hamilton among the shows that followed the trail Rent blazed, so the borrowed backdrop worked.
The Song Nobody Expected To Become An Anthem
The person missing from that stage is a big part of why the night hit so hard.
Jonathan Larson wrote Rent‘s book, music and lyrics. He died of an aortic dissection on January 25, 1996, at 35, on the morning of the show’s first Off-Broadway preview at New York Theatre Workshop. He missed everything that came next: the move to Broadway that spring, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, four Tonys including Best Musical, and a run of 12 years and 5,123 performances.
Anthony was there from the workshop days. He told the Associated Press the cast first heard “Seasons of Love” gathered around a piano with Weil and Greif. “I’ve never heard a song like it and certainly not in theater,” he said, and he remembers everyone in the room leaning in.
He expected a small Off-Broadway splash at most. Broadway wasn’t on his radar, and a 30th anniversary definitely wasn’t.
Thirty years on, the staging hasn’t changed. There’s no set to hide behind, only the company in one long line at the edge of the stage.
Why Rent Meant So Much To Gay Men
For a lot of our readers, Rent was the first time Broadway told their story. In 1996 AIDS was still killing young men in New York, and here was a hit musical with HIV-positive characters, a drag queen and a gay couple at its center.
That couple was Angel, the street drummer in heels, and Tom Collins, the anarchist philosophy teacher who falls for her. Plenty of gay theater kids knew every word of their duet “I’ll Cover You,” and Angel’s death in Act Two still empties tissue boxes.
Wilson won the 1996 Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical as Angel, and played her again in the 2005 film opposite Jesse L. Martin‘s Collins. On the morning of the concert, he sang “I’ll Cover You” on Today with fellow original company member Marcus Paul James, as Playbill reported.
That night, Angel got her big entrance number, “Today 4 U.” Broadway Cares posted it the next morning under the caption “An angel among us!”
He wasn’t the only Angel in the building. Wilson Cruz and Jai both took over the role during the Broadway run, and Cruz also played it on tour. Telly Leung, another concert performer, played Angel when Neil directed Rent at the Hollywood Bowl in 2010.
Neil Patrick Harris And A Whole Bench Of Rent Alumni
Neil’s history with the show goes back further than the Hollywood Bowl: playing Mark on a national tour was his first musical theater role. Aaron toured in Rent too, and later played Roger at that same Hollywood Bowl production.
Tracie Thoms, the film’s Joanne, told BroadwayWorld she was turned down for the Broadway production, booked the movie anyway, and ended up in the show’s final Broadway cast. Rachel told the same outlet she once had to drop out of playing Mimi in a production of Rent for her West Side Story screen test. And Jordan Fisher, Mark in Fox’s 2019 live broadcast, joked to the AP that the night was “‘Rent’-cella.”
Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, which ran the night, has been providing meals, medication and health care to people living with HIV/AIDS and other serious illnesses since the late 1980s. This time the Gates Foundation pledged to match livestream donations up to $525,600, the number of minutes in a year from the song.
The Finale That Gave Everyone Chills
With the livestream gone, the clips are what’s left. Broadway Cares posted the finale with a three-word caption, “Full body chills.” It passed 870,000 plays in about a day.
Larson never saw any of it. Anthony told the AP he thinks it would thrill him to know how many people have kept the show alive, and that they still want to come back and celebrate it.