What is the musical Rent about?
It should be called “Rant” since it’s a rant fest, but singing rant, of course, in depressing and sometimes philosophical and introspective ways. Ranting about rent is what they do focusing on contemporary issues like being gay and having AIDS. An AIDS person is living at an apartment building that doesn’t require them to pay any rent and so the person can stay alive just paying for treatments, but then the landlord wants to impose a rent charge and sends his tenants into panic. After an introduction with the cast singing “Seasons of Love,” the film opens with apartment tenants (including two friends and roommates, Mark and Roger) expressing their anger with suddenly being asked to pay rent which had previously been waived by the landlord. Collins, a former roommate of Mark’s and friend to both Mark and Roger, returns from out of town and is attacked by three men and left for dead in an alley (“Rent”). Benny, the landlord and former roommate of Mark and Collins, who has married into a
