Jonathan Larson’s landmark 1996 musical Rent premiered 100 years after the opera that inspired it and one day after the composer’s sudden death of aortic dissection at age 35. Larson wrote about the world he lived in — 1990s New York City, when AIDS had no cure and poverty was rising. The story parallels Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, switching Paris to Alphabet City and a sentimental approach to death from tuberculosis to a fatalistic acceptance of living as HIV-positive. Larson’s only big change replaces Puccini’s tragic ending with a joyous appreciation of life.
Weston Theater Company presents this energetic musical on its 30th anniversary with a fine balance of dark and light. Massive gray windowpanes fill the theater’s back wall while tiny Christmas lights twinkle on the street. A drab cityscape, its size sketched with catwalks, pulses with bright light when music and movement animate it. This abandoned edge of Manhattan overflows with young people scratching out their paths toward love, rebellion and art.
With no money to pay rent, filmmaker Mark (Trevor James) and rock musician Roger (Christian Hopper) live in a derelict loft next to a tent city. They poach electricity from an adjacent building and for months are left in peace. When their upwardly mobile landlord, Benny (Xavier Turner), plans to develop the area, he demands back rent, and they don’t have it.
Mark films his friends, narrating his camerawork to introduce them. Roger and Tom (Stanley Martin) are both HIV-positive, as are their love interests. S&M club dancer Mimi (Alexis Papaleo) flirts with Roger, but seduction is fraught when they’re both reluctant to reveal their health status. In La Bohème, Mimi drops a key to invite Rodolfo’s pursuit; here she drops a bag of heroin. The drag queen/street drummer Angel (Aaron Gabriel Graham) falls hard for Tom, a philosophical computer programmer. Their bond is the sweetest arc in the show.
Mark’s girlfriend, Maureen (Caitlin Doak), has left him for Joanne (Finley-Imani Rivera). Maureen does political performance art, while Joanne puts her Harvard degree and legal skills to use protecting civil liberties.
The art from these artists isn’t necessarily good — Maureen’s confrontational piece is a parody of profundity — but it’s the attitude that matters. Mark’s documentary of his friends may reveal nothing more than his passion for seeing the world. Roger has lost his ability to write music, stuck on a lyric he can’t complete: “One song before I…”
Friendship shatters artistic self-importance. In “La Vie Bohème,” they gently mock their cultural touchstones and their creative abilities while celebrating life outside the mainstream. Yet the thirst to leave a mark is a powerful response to despair. The song proclaims, “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!”
Darkness encroaches, but Rent rages with hope. The trick is making the characters rise from anguish toward light, not just launch into a showbiz dance number. Director and choreographer Michael Berresse respects the full emotional range but tilts toward exuberance. He composes on the micro level — a marvel of 13 characters fidgeting in unison while seated — and the macro, where every tabletop is made for dancing and mass movement is transformative.
The musical’s structure is best appreciated in the wrenching second-act number “Without You.” To let the audience experience sadness as the essence of love, three sets of characters are spread across the stage, their stories distinct but interwoven by music. Arguments part two couples; the third is parted by death. Each story amplifies the others, and the urgency of the present is laid before our eyes.
The cornerstone of the production is a cast with exceptional voices, expressive movement and well-honed acting abilities. The lead performers captivate, and the six-member ensemble is studded with talent. Small, intense scenes sparkle, and the full-cast numbers immerse the audience in something that feels as large as an era. The harmonies soar.
Costumes flash back to the ’90s and its crazy stew of stripes, plaids and pantyhose. Grunge mingles with heels, and gay glitter with mile-wide lapels. Musical director Larry Pressgrove, on keyboards, anchors a strong five-piece band that plays on the Broadway side of rock, topped by occasional edgy dissonance.
Weston has wrapped up the treasure nicely, but revivals beg us to ask: Why now? When the musical won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Musical in 1996, critics praised it for staking out new Broadway terrain. Today the novelty is less obvious, and some structural flaws are harder to overlook.
Larson’s death added a special poignance to a show confronting mortality.
Larson’s death added a special poignance to a show confronting mortality. The tough truth is, he might well have revised it if he’d lived. The show doesn’t need all of its 30-some songs, and the first act includes too many plot details that fizzle. The accomplishment of singing nearly everything, including voicemail, grows tiring when tunes lapse to singsong. But the second act offers a riot of pure emotion, and the lyrics still dazzle.
Weston’s production releases every shred of joy these characters struggle to find. It’s their sorrows that are harder to experience as time and medicine have blunted the impact of AIDS. Larson had the courage to set a musical on that battlefield, but even he shied from tragedy. Rent is about buoyancy.
To be young is to feel invincible, and to face dying young shatters that central life force. Yet confronting death is the most vivid way to cherish life, however short. That spirit shines in the show’s beautiful “Seasons of Love,” which equips us all to compare the 525,600 minutes in a year with the best way to measure time — in love. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Living for Today | Theater review: Rent, Weston Theater Company”
This article appears in July 29 • 2026.
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