the end of an era
Originally published at skankage.com. Please leave any comments there.
before turmoil erupted on here yesterday, i was planning to blog about this, but i’ve postponed doing so until now. so here goes.
RENT is ending. yes, the musical near and dear to my heart is ending its 12-year broadway stay. the nederlander will go up for sale and some other musical will take its place. RENT will now be able to be performed in high schools and colleges everywhere, which is rather exciting, but broadway will forever be changed.
what’s happening is really not THAT big a deal because it doesn’t mean the show is over forever. while the show will still tour, it will no longer have a permanent home and the RENT lotteries are over. since i don’t live anywhere near new york city, it’s really not that big a deal to me, but i can see why RENTheads everywhere are so sad. to many, the nederlander is a second home. many have spent countless hours inside and outside that theatre, waiting for the show to begin or to meet a cast member. if i lived in new york, i would probably be one of those people.
what saddens me, i guess, is the fact that new york will now be RENT-less. not that it really should matter to me because i’ve only been twice, but the ads for RENT, whether you’ve seen it or not, have become somewhat of a new york city staple, and now they’ll be gone forever, too.
oh, well…we all knew it would happen some day. just 10 years on broadway is always a big deal, so RENT’s broadway demise was inevitable.