look, I find some of what you teach suspect

RIP, RENT.

I'm having trouble believing that RENT is actually over -- it's been a part of Broadway basically since I knew what Broadway was (well not quite, I WAS watching Peter Pan and South Pacific as a 3-year-old), but still.

I didn't start off loving RENT. Like many things in life, I refused to get excited about it until Matt Stern Made me (the story is the same for Wicked, Avenue Q, and Stephen Sondheim, as well. Parade, too for that matter). But I digress. As a kid doing musical theater in the Beth Or and PV world, I was convinced that RENT was too commercialized -- everybody liked it, and I was a musical theater purist, so of course I wouldn't. Having every word memorized and shouting it on buses to youth group events and during rehearsals for other shows did not appeal to me. In fact, I blocked it out so well from my repertoire of musicals-i-like that I didn't see it or listen to the full CD until 2005, when the movie came out. Matt told me I had to see it, and that I was ridiculous if I didn't, so I got the CDs from him, listened to them over and over until I felt like I got the plot, and then went to see the movie. Which I enjoyed thoroughly. I became a latent RENT-head, somehow knowing all of the words to the songs I had judged people for 5, 10 years earlier. The allure wore off about a year later, when I worked as a counselor for Rockwood Adventures, a teen tour. Nothing kills a RENT buzz like 12- and 13-year-old girls screaming the lyrics.

Anyway, fast forward again to this April, when I took a well-deserved weekend off from the craziness of senior year at Brandeis to go see the show with Ronis in New York. I'm sure the show lost something over time, and I get that it's now a relic of something that doesn't quite exist anymore, but its music still resonated with me. At the time, I loved the feel of the theater itself (although in retrospect, it was a little East Village theme-park-y). Anyway, I'm definitely glad I got a chance to see it before it closed, if only because it's a part of musical theater history, and there are few things in life I love more than musical theater history.

So rest in peace, RENT. Lots of people will miss you.