Award-winning rock musical Rent is coming to Newcastle's Civic Theatre next year for a limited run of shows.
Jonathan Larson's beloved musical transports audiences to the vibrant streets of New York City's East Village where dreams are born, friendships are tested, and the power of love prevails against all odds.
It features the songs Seasons of Love, Take Me or Leave Me and La Vie Bohème and, while set in the 1990s and early-noughties, has renewed relevance today.
"With Rent, Jonathan Larson unleashed a phenomenon - it would be difficult to find someone who hasn't at least heard of it," said producer Lauren Peters, of LPD Productions.
"The characters who live in the East Village of 1990s New York navigate that which resonates so deeply with us in Australia in 2024: cost of living pressures, the threat of preventable disease, the subtle feeling that all the ways in which we can now communicate belie our disconnection.
"All of this sounds terribly heavy but Rent somehow takes all this and turns it into a joyous celebration of connection, chosen family, and life itself - and it's that joy in the face of all of life's adversity and opportunity that is perhaps best captured in its iconic number Seasons of Love, a song which has achieved the rarest of Broadway feats and transcended the show for which it was written."
Rent opened Off-Broadway in 1996 and quickly became a global phenomenon. The show earned Larson multiple Tony Awards along with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama but he never saw the impact of his masterwork - he died suddenly in the early hours of the day the show opened to the public.
