GLR September-October 2024

of the characters in Rent were based on those in her novel Peo ple in Trouble , and that Larson commodified the AIDS crisis in New York to make a buck. Garside refers to a 1998 editorial in The Guardian by British columnist Joanna Coles, who com plained that Rent is an appropriation of struggles that Larson had not experienced firsthand. Garside concedes that Larson, a straight white man, may have had greater access to the movers and shakers of the theater world, notably Stephen Sondheim, than did Schulman, and this may have enabled him to launch the musical on an Off-Broadway stage that would otherwise have been out of reach. Seasons of Love traces the influence of Rent on theatrical productions with LGBT elements since 1996 and on composers such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, who directed Tick, Tick... Boom! , a film about Larson’s efforts to create a musical earlier in his ca reer. While skeptics doubted that Rent , with its very specific set ting, could do well in London in 1998, or in Manchester in 2021, it has had a life of its own in the U.K. Critics have noted that Rent was still something of a work in progress when it opened in 1996, but it has been largely preserved without revi sion because of its composer’s untimely death, and it has had numerous revivals in the 28 intervening years. _______________________________________________________ Jean Roberta is a widely published writer based in Regina, Canada. BLESSINGS by Chukwuebuka Ibeh Doubleday. 288 pages, $28. B OOKSTORES AND LIBRARIES are full of coming of-age books by gay men, but Blessings isn’t your usual novel in that genre—an aspect that’s both appealing and aggravating. Initially set in Nigeria—a country that’s notori ously anti-gay—in a relatively well-off household, the story opens with the arrival of a new member of the family, a young man whom the patriarch, a reti cent, almost bullying adult named Anozie, brings home at the behest of an acquaintance who wanted the boy to learn a trade—or possibly, to just go away, as the story lightly hints. T ERRI S CHLICHENMEYER Nigerian Love Affair

J EAN R OBERTA 5,123 Performances

SEASONS OF LOVE Why Rent Ma tt ers by Emily Garside Applause. 320 pages, $29.95

S EASONS OF LOVE is a wide-ranging discussion of the hit musical Rent by Emily Garside, a British researcher and playwright. The story of composer Jonathan Larson, who died of a brain aneurysm on the night of the final dress re hearsal for its Broadway opening in 1996, has become part of the story of Rent , which had a twelve-year run and over 5,000 performances. Larson’s sources for the musical have been the subject of de bate ever since it opened. Conventional wisdom holds, and Gar side provides evidence for the view, that its plot was based on Puccini’s opera La Bohème , about starving artists in 19th-cen tury Paris. However, the original idea for a contemporary musi cal about starving New York artists came from playwright Billy Aronson, who apparently persuaded Larson to move the setting from the Upper Wide Side to the grungy East Village, which was a better match for the garrets of Paris. Garside contends that the title has a double meaning: the obvious sense of rent as payment for housing and also the sense of “’to tear apart’ as a metaphor for the community torn apart by AIDS.” Garside finds subtly queer implications in LaBohème aswell as in Rent . The character of Angel, who is gay and who dies in Rent , seems to be based on Schaunard in LaBohème , whose sex uality is not clearly identified but who sings in a falsetto voice. In this way, according to Garside, Larson represented marginal ized characters in pre-millennial New York while remaining true (in his fashion) to one of the “classic” literary sources. The “Schulman case” against Rent is more controversial. Lesbian writer and activist Sarah Schulman claimed that some

Almost immediately, the fifteen-year-old Obiefuna (sometimes called “Obi”) becomes ob sessed with this newcomer, Aboy, who sleeps on a mattress in a room shared with Obiefuna and his younger brother, who is Anozie’s favorite—a fact that Obiefuna grudgingly accepts. When Aboy squeezes into bed with Obiefuna and his brother one night, Obiefuna kisses the slumbering Aboy; later, the two share an intimate moment in the kitchen. Anozie observes the lingering act, grows angry, ban ishes Aboy, and sends Obiefuna to a “seminary,” which is best described as a secondary school.

Jonathan Larson at the New York Theatre Workshop, 1993.

September–October 2024

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