As I read this headline instantaly the number of minutes in a year come to me, though I think cups of coffee are a better way to count a year gone by. Rent will close on Broadway.
Nine hundred thirty thousand, one hundred eighty minutes.
That’s how you measure the total running time “Rent” will have played on Broadway when, as the producers said on Tuesday, it closes after its evening performance on June 1, making it the seventh-longest-running Broadway show in history.
But the length of its run is not nearly as significant as the kind of show it was. An East Village rock version of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème,” “Rent” brought a youthful energy — and young theatergoers — to Broadway, to a degree not seen since “Hair.” It also brought with it a real-life story so affecting that it would have overwhelmed the musical itself had the substance of the musical not been so intertwined with the story of its creation.
