How RENT pays its dues to La Bohème

In his ode to tumultuous love, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare placed these lines in the mouth of the impulsive young Romeo:

"Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs, 
Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes, 
Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with loving tears."

Capturing hot youthful lust transformed into an all-consuming blaze, then cruelly extinguished, the lines are all the more meaningful given Romeo isn’t talking about Juliet. In Act 1, Scene 1, he’s still crushing on her cuz, Rosaline.

Countless creative geniuses have grappled with these “violent delights”,from well before Shakespeare, through the star-cross’d lovers of Giacomo Puccini’s soaring 1895 opera La Bohème, and on to Jonathan Larson’s 1996 rock musical, Rent.

Mother’s boy

Italian composer extraordinaire Puccini was born just before Christmas, December 22, 1858, in Lucca, a city enveloped by the verdant Tuscan hills. An all-pervasive beauty that surely seeped into his young heart. But horror awaited: the death of his beloved father, Michele, when Giacomo was just five years old.

Luckily, his mighty mother Albina was a force to be reckoned with who kept the family afloat, drawing on their longstanding association with music at the Cathedral of San Martino to secure a small pension.

Art has many mothers. For Puccini, the greatest inspiration was fictional Ethiopian princess Aida, or rather Giuseppe Verdi’s opera of the same name. He caught it in Pisa as a teenager and was determined to carve his own path away from the church. Not that it was easy. In the wake of Italian unification in 1861, the gulf between the rich and the poor was ever widening, and Puccini would struggle while studying in Milan.

We can trace these formative trials in the DNA of La Bohème. Transposed from Milan to Paris’ bohemian Quartier Latin in the 1830s, the neighbourhood is full of poor young artists and lovers. Rodolfo is just about done, feeding pages of his play to a stuttering fire to keep him and bestie Marcello warm. When their roommates Colline and Schaunard return with unexpected funds, fuel and food, it seems as if their fortunes are, quite literally, on the up.

Then swooning seamstress Mimì walks into Rodolfo’s life, seeking a candle’s light while the lads are out celebrating at Café Momus. Rodolfo pockets her lost key – not a euphemism – and encourages her to join them. Soon, boisterous singer Musetta arrives in the arms of her lover, the wealthy Alcindoro, but she’s still holding a candle for Marcello.

Ra-ra, ah-ah-ah, the scene is set for bad romance, as this tempestuous quartet fall hard and fast in and out of love as bitter winter gives way to spring, but its icy tendrils cling on. Wracked with consumption, Mimì will succumb while Musetta prays by her bedside and Rodolfo regrets his flighty ways.

From Paris to New York

La Bohème debuted at the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 1, 1896, and was an astonishing success, even if critics were initially a bit snooty, mistaking his depiction of life’s great sacrifices for sentimentality. Puccini’s achievement not only boosted his fast-rising star, but also changed the course of opera, ushering in the Verismo style in which ordinary people could see their own life’s struggles reflected.

Tragically, Albina didn’t live to see the day. But countless creative lights have shone brighter for her unwavering belief in Puccini. Opera Australia’s most recent production recasts the story in Berlin during the last days of the Weimar Republic, with darkest future history banging on the door. Filmmaker Baz Luhrmann transformed it into the Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor-led jukebox film-turned stage musical, Moulin Rouge, after directing his own version of the opera for Opera Australia in the early 1990s.

Indeed, Puccini borrowed La Bohème’s undying love story not only from his own infamous procession of broken hearts, but also from French novelist and poet Henri Murger’s 1851 novella Scenes of Bohemian Life (Scènes de la Vie de Bohème).

Boom town

That lineage winds its way towards White Plains in New York City, where soon-to-be lyricist, composer and playwright Jonathan Larson was born on February 4, 1960. A musician and performer from his earliest days, his dad, Allan, swore he could sing in tune in nappies. Larson was as much in love with Elton John and The Beatles as he was with Stephen Sondheim, with the latter becoming a mentor.

A voracious creator, Larson propelled himself from a freezing, teeny apartment while waiting tables at the Moondance Diner, steadily towards his lifelong dream of Broadway. He dramatised these down but not out days in his one-man rock monologue Tick, Tick... Boom!, originally titled 30/90 and then BoHo Days, which would go on to become the Oscar-nominated 2021 movie starring Andrew Garfield.

Inspired by fellow playwright Billy Aronson to update Puccini’s La Bohème, Larson relocated the action from 1830s Paris to New York in the 1990s under the shadow of the HIV/AIDS crisis, rather than tuberculosis. After a work-in-progress version in 1993, Rent opened at the New York Theatre Workshop on January 26, 1996.

Set in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side on Christmas Eve, it also features a gaggle of young artists trying to get by on not much at all. Roomies Mark, a filmmaker, and

Roger, a frustrated musician, shiver in the apartment now owned by their semi-estranged mate Benny, who threatens to kick them out if they don’t clear their arrears.

Mark’s ex, Joanne, has other ideas, set on staging a musical protest forcing Benny to come to the table. All the while, fellow tenant Mimi is in deep with Roger. They’re joined by Tom, recently expelled from MIT, who has fallen for drag queen and drummer, Angel. With catastrophe waiting in the wings, terrible loss only strengthens their bonds of love.

Sadly, the greatest misfortune is off-book. The night before Rent debuted, Larson died of an aortic dissection. He was only 35. But as with the greatest works of Puccini and Shakespeare, Larson’s legacy lives on. Scoring Tony and Pulitzer Awards, Rent, like true love, never dies.

La Bohème continues until 20 September and Rent is on-stage from 27 September - 1 November as part of Opera Australia’s 2025 season.