Rent 30 Reunited the Original Cast, and I Still Knew Every Word

Rent turned 30 with a one-night Broadway reunion, 67 performers, and one forgotten box of matches.

I have not listened to the Rent soundtrack in decades. And yet about three notes into certain songs during Rent 30, my brain opened a dusty filing cabinet marked IMPORTANT INFORMATION FROM THE 1990s and handed me every lyric.

Of course I still know all the words. That wasn’t even the most emotional part of the night.

The one-night concert took place October 26 at the Richard Rodgers Theatre as a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Michael Greif, who directed the original production, directed it, and 67 performers took the stage, from original cast members to later alumni to Broadway stars who just wanted in.

How Has It Been 30 Years?

I reject the premise. There is no reasonable explanation for Rent being 30 when I distinctly remember camping out with friends for tickets to see the original cast. We ended up in the very back, because devotion apparently doesn’t guarantee good seats. It didn’t matter. That production became one of those experiences permanently attached to a specific version of me. I remember the music and the obsession, and how different Rent felt from everything else I’d seen.

Thirty years later, I still remember every word, which is both lovely and mildly alarming.

The Original Cast Still Sounds Like the Original Cast

The biggest surprise was how much the original cast still sounds like themselves. Adam Pascal starts singing, and Roger is Roger again. Daphne Rubin-Vega opens her mouth, and there’s Mimi. And I’m sorry to every other Mark Cohen who has ever picked up a striped scarf and a camera, but Anthony Rapp is still the Mark. There’s something unmistakable about the way he sings those songs, and he sounded incredible.

Pascal and Rubin-Vega also did “Light My Candle,” complete with Pascal forgetting the matches. Honestly, it made the whole thing better. Nobody was pretending no time had passed. It was a reunion, people laughed, things went slightly sideways, and the forgotten matches fit right in.

And Then Idina Walked Out

If anyone wondered which member of the original cast became the biggest star, the applause answered pretty quickly when Idina Menzel walked onstage.

It was also sweet to see her back with Taye Diggs. Their marriage is in the past, but their history with this show isn’t, and Rent was part of both of their lives before either became as famous as they are now. Seeing them in that world together felt significant without anyone making a big thing of it.

The People I Was Very Happy to See Together

I was embarrassingly delighted to see Aaron Tveit (Chess) and Neil Patrick Harris, who played Mark for the number, team up for “What You Own.”

I was just as thrilled any time Tveit and Nicholas Christopher (Chess) shared a stage. If you saw the recent revival of Chess, you understand. They were extraordinary, and I would have greedily taken more of them singing together than Rent 30 gave me. I’d like Broadway to keep finding excuses to put those two men in the same room. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable demand.

Christopher, who sang “I’ll Cover You” with Wilson Cruz, also helped ease my biggest disappointment of the night: Jesse L. Martin’s absence. I missed him a lot. But if Martin couldn’t be there, Christopher can sing Tom Collins any day of the week as far as I’m concerned.

Jordan Fisher, Hello

Jordan Fisher caught me completely off guard. Where have I been? His “Tango: Maureen” made me pay attention right away, and he had exactly the right energy for Mark. He played Mark in Fox’s Rent: Live in 2019, so clearly I’m the late one here. Consider that corrected.

That was part of the fun. The stage wasn’t only the original cast. It was full of people who have become part of Rent’s history over the last 30 years: Norbert Leo Butz (who had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Wicked original cast reunion with Menzel at the end!), Will Chase, Eden Espinosa, Tracie Thoms, Telly Leung, Antonique Smith, Jai Rodriguez, Ephraim Sykes, Tamyra Gray, Adam Kantor, Merle Dandridge, Wilson Cruz, and the list kept going. Watching so many generations of performers move through the same songs made it clear that Rent stopped belonging to one cast a long time ago. Generation after generation has handed it down and rediscovered it.

Wilson Cruz was there as Angel, and because I can’t keep my fandoms in separate boxes, the Star Trek: Discovery fan in me immediately wanted him and Anthony Rapp to sing something together. The evening didn’t owe me that. I wanted it anyway.

The One Choice I Didn’t Quite Get

I like Rachel Zegler a lot. She’s enormously talented, and her “Without You” with Tveit was lovely. I just didn’t entirely understand why she was there.

Zegler doesn’t have the same history with Rent as most of the people on that stage, and at a concert celebrating 30 years of the show’s legacy, I wished her spot had gone to one of the actresses who actually played Mimi. It isn’t that she wasn’t good. She absolutely was. I wanted Rent 30 to belong, as much as possible, to the people who have been part of Rent. Twenty-three performers have played Mimi on Broadway, so surely one of them was available.

Rent on the Hamilton Set

There was also something surreal about seeing Rent performed on the Hamilton set at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where Hamilton is currently running. I never imagined those two pieces of musical theater history sharing the same stage.

Rent changed Broadway for a generation, and here it was temporarily taking over the home of another musical that went on to do much the same. I’m probably reading too much into some scaffolding. I don’t care. It made me happy.

No Day But Today, Apparently

The more I watched, the more I thought about Jonathan Larson. He died January 25, 1996, the night before Rent’s Off-Broadway debut. Sadly, he never got to watch it win the Tony Awards or the Pulitzer Prize, never saw the lines outside the Nederlander Theatre, and never knew people would still be singing these songs 30 years later. He certainly never got to see 67 performers gather on a Broadway stage to celebrate what he created.

The concert benefiting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS felt right for a musical so tied to the AIDS crisis. Larson wrote Rent in honor of the people he knew who were living with HIV and the friends he lost to AIDS. I hope he would be proud of all this.

Finale B Got Me

Then came the finale, which, to those of us who know the original cast recording by heart, is “Finale B.” I may have cried. Fine. I cried.

Hearing those voices across all casts together again after all this time was overwhelming, especially after spending the night bouncing between who I was when I first saw Rent and who I am now. Thirty years happened between those two people. Friends changed, Broadway changed, relationships began and ended. And when those songs started, I still knew every word. Apparently the filing cabinet was never going to lose any of it.

Rent 30 was messy in the best way, and the performers clearly understood what this show has meant to people for three decades. It was also more personal than I expected. Thirty years after camping out for tickets and watching the original cast from the back of the theater, I got to see them step into these songs again, and for a couple of hours 30 years didn’t feel like very long.

It was everything I could have asked for. No day but today.