Rent (musical)

Rent is a rock musical with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson loosely based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists struggling to survive and create a life in New York City's East Village in the thriving days of Bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.

The musical was first seen in a workshop production at New York Theatre Workshop in 1993. This same Off-Broadway theatre was also the musical's initial home following its official 1996 opening. The show's creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly of an aortic dissection, believed to have been caused by undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, 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 of 5,123 performances, the eleventh longest-running Broadway show. The production grossed over $280 million.

Rent

Rent may refer to:

Rent (MUD)

Rent, in MUDs (primarily DikuMUDs), is a mechanism for both enabling and limiting persistence of a player character's possessions. In the "traditional" rent paradigm, in order to keep belongings between game sessions, the player must travel to an inn and use the rent command there, and is assessed a price, in game money, for each inventory item; items that cannot be paid for are not persisted. If the player simply uses the quit command rather than rent, inventory items are not kept, and fall to the ground. Many evolutions of this approach exist: the rent command is often made to be performable anywhere rather than only at an inn, sometimes costs are removed or made negligible, and so on. At times, in MUDs where inventory is made to simply persist automatically when the player quits the game, the conceptualization of inventory persistence as "rent" is sufficiently ingrained that this is referred to as "autorent".

Rent is often considered an annoyance to players, which is a factor that drives the many variations seen on the concept. On the other hand, the need to pay to retain one's items can provide an impetus to engagement with the game, though this may be seen as unduly coercive.

Rent (song)

"Rent" is a 1987 single by the Pet Shop Boys. It was released in the UK by Parlophone on 12 October 1987.

Song information

The lyrics are commonly thought to deal with a financially one-sided relationship, i.e. that of a kept man, the title implying more specifically the lot of a rent boy. Neil Tennant, however, stated in the Actually: Further Listening liner notes:

It peaked at number 8 in the British charts. Producer Stephen Hague remixed the song for single release.

Video

The video for the song was directed by Derek Jarman. It features two intercut storylines. One, filmed in black and white, shows Chris Lowe arriving at King's Cross station by train and walking past various low-life characters. The other, filmed in colour, features Margi Clarke as the partner of a wealthy man (played by Alexander Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath), who is hosting a dinner party. The lyrics are sung by Tennant, who plays her chauffeur. The woman becomes annoyed when the man pays her no attention. She then gets Tennant to drive her to King's Cross. There, she meets Chris Lowe on the platform and they embrace.

Musical

Musical may refer to:

See also

Musical film

The musical film is a film genre in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing.

The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, though in some cases they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate "production numbers".

The musical film was a natural development of the stage musical after the emergence of sound film technology. Typically, the biggest difference between film and stage musicals is the use of lavish background scenery and locations that would be impractical in a theater. Musical films characteristically contain elements reminiscent of theater; performers often treat their song and dance numbers as if there is a live audience watching. In a sense, the viewer becomes the diegetic audience, as the performer looks directly into the camera and performs to it.

Musical films in the Western world

The classical sound era

The 1930s through the early 1950s are considered to be the golden age of the musical film, when the genre's popularity was at its highest in the Western world.

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals.

Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre emerged during the 19th century, with many structural elements established by the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America. These were followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the musical theatre works of American creators like George M. Cohan. The Princess Theatre musicals and other smart shows like Of Thee I Sing (1931) were artistic steps forward beyond revues and other frothy entertainments of the early 20th century and led to such groundbreaking works as Show Boat (1927) and Oklahoma! (1943). Some of the most famous and iconic musicals through the decades that followed include West Side Story (1957), The Fantasticks (1960), Hair (1967), A Chorus Line (1975), Les Misérables (1985), The Phantom of the Opera (1986), Rent (1996), The Producers (2001) and Wicked (2003).