By Emilie Duggan

Collegian Staff

Some people have seen “RENT;” some have listened to the soundtrack; but almost everyone has at least heard of the award winning Broadway show. For those of you who have no knowledge of the show at all, here’s a quick primer.

Jonathan Larson’s “RENT” opened on the 100th anniversary of “La Boheme,” an event that Larson didn’t plan, but one that was apropos for a show that was based on Giacomo Puccini’s 19th century opera.

“People try all the time to do stuff like this,” Larson said in a 1996 interview with the New York Times. “But this is an amazing coincidence.”

What wasn’t a coincidence were all the parallels to the classic opera that can be found in Larson’s show. Larson was greatly influenced by “La Boheme,” a show he had seen in puppet form as a child. He recognized himself and his friends in Puccini’s bohemian characters, identifying with their survival struggles. He took the opera one step further and modernized their fight, bringing it up-to-date musically and by having his characters wrestle not only with financial woes, but also with drugs, sexual confusion, and AIDS.

Just as “RENT” is based on “La Boheme,” Puccini’s opera is based on a book of autographical short stories of Henri Murger, a French writer that struggled in life to stay true to his art. When Larson was writing “RENT” he would refer to Murger’s work, “Scenes de la Vie de Boheme,” knowing he needed to dig deeper than Puccini’s opera in order to fully give his character’s life. All of Murger’s stories are about struggling artists who choose their art over everything, including life.

“Murger’s characters are much grittier,” Larson told the New York Times before his death in 1996. It wouldn’t be long before he would stop trying so hard to remain true to Puccini’s work. Though the basis of the characters and the story is clearly visible beneath the surface, it is Larson’s own life – and death – and the people in it that would truly define what the show would become.

Rodolfo the poet became Roger, the ex-rock band front man, looking for his one shot at immortality before he dies. The updated version of Murger and Puccini’s character is HIV-positive, a former junkie, and emotionally cut off after “his girlfriend, April, left a note saying ‘we’ve got AIDS,’ before slitting her wrists in the bathroom.” Roger, like Rodolfo before him, only truly begins to live again when he meets Mimi.

In “La Boheme,” Mimi is frail, sick with tuberculosis. Her inevitable death in the opera is sad, but not a surprise. Larson’s Mimi is also sick, but with the plague of the 20th century. This updated version of Puccini’s ing