In this rock opera, the story centers on Mark, a filmmaker and also the play’s narrator, and his friends: Roger, an HIV+ rocker Mimi, an HIV+ exotic dancer and Roger’s love interest Tom Collins, a gay HIV+ cyberpunk teacher anarchist Angel, a bisexual HIV+ cross-dressing street performer Maureen, Mark’s ex-girlfriend-turned-lesbian performance artist Joanne, Maureen’s uptight lawyer girlfriend and Benjamin “Benny” Coffin III, their ex-roommate-turned-landlord former friend, as they try to live in the age that frowns upon human relationships due to the AIDS epidemic. This two-act musical draws on two things: 1) The aforementioned opera and 2) Jonathan Larson’s own experiences living in 1980s New York, more specifically Manhattan’s East Village.

Puccini’s treatment of the classic love story is fairly straight-forward and simplistic: guy and girl meet, fall in love, break up, make up, break up again, and reconcile one final time before girl dies from a horrible disease, all the while exploring what it meant to be a bohemian in 19th Century France.

Puccini’s four-act opera centers around the 1830s love story between Rodolfo, a poet, and Mimi, a seamstress with what appears to tuberculosis, and how it affects his friends, Marcello, a painter Colline, a philosopher Schaunard, a musician and Musetta, Marcello’s ex-girlfriend singer who has at the present time hooked up with Alcindoro, an elder Councillor - all the while avoiding their landlord Benoit. But before we dissect the two versions, let’s look back to what this modern day musical sensation was based on: Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Boheme. For this Adaptation Analysis I’ll break down the background for, and the similarities and differences between, the Broadway productions originally directed by Grief and the 2005 Chris Columbus feature-length film adaptation. This musical ran from the 1993 to 1996 off-Broadway productions at the New York Theatre Workshop, directed by Michael Greif, all the way to the productions on Broadway itself, which started in 1996 and ran through September 7th, 2008 when the show closed down for good. For this Adaptation Analysis we go back to Broadway - more specifically, Broadway and 41st Street: the address of the Nederlander Theatre, the former site of the rock-opera musical RENT, originally written and composed by Jonathan Larson (1960-1996).

Rent jonathan larson summary