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    A Study Guide for Jonathan Larson's "Rent" (lit-to-film)
    A Study Guide for Jonathan Larson's "Rent" (lit-to-film)
    A Study Guide for Jonathan Larson's "Rent" (lit-to-film)
    Ebook43 pages43 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jonathan Larson's "Rent" (lit-to-film)

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jonathan Larson's "Rent" (lit-to-film), excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781410393500
    A Study Guide for Jonathan Larson's "Rent" (lit-to-film)

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      A Study Guide for Jonathan Larson's "Rent" (lit-to-film) - Gale

      15

      Rent

      Jonathan Larson

      2005

      Introduction

      Based on Jonathan Larson's award-winning musical of the same name, director Christopher Columbus's film adaptation of Rent was released in November 2005, starring a number of the cast from the original Broadway production and with a screenplay by Stephen Chbosky.

      Filmed in under five months for an estimated budget of $40 million (worldwide gross earnings edged just over $31 million), Rent was met with decidedly mixed reviews and saw very little attention during the 2006 awards season. Only Rosario Dawson (Mimi) and Larson (lyrics and music) garnered multiple nominations for their work. The very limited success of the film is somewhat surprising given the critical acclaim of the stage version, which launched off-Broadway in 1996 before moving to a larger Broadway venue later that same year. The stage production won a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award for Best Musical, and numerous other awards on its way to grossing over $280 million.

      Itself based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème (1896), this rock musical tells the story of a group of talented but impoverished artists, musicians, and intellectuals as they struggle to survive in New York City's East Village. Although Puccini's plague, tuberculosis, is replaced in the movie by HIV/AIDS, many of the characters from the original opera have parallels in the film. Puccini's Mimi, for instance, is a seamstress with tuberculosis, while Larson's Mimi is an HIV-positive exotic dancer with a heroin addiction. Puccini's Rodolfo (poet) becomes Roger (songwriter), Marcello (painter) becomes Mark (filmmaker), and so on. However dated the film might feel, its central themes are, in many ways, timeless: the struggle to connect as human beings and to cultivate a sense of belonging (and art) in an increasingly soulless corporate world.

      Plot Summary

      The film opens with a nod to Rent's stage beginnings as Columbus focuses on its best-known song, Seasons of Love, sung by the eight cast members on a bare stage, each lit by a single spotlight and facing outward to an empty, cavernous theater. The question raised by the song is a simple one: how do you measure a year in the life of any person? Is it in minutes, seconds, or cups of coffee consumed? Or is a life measured, as the song concludes, by the love it holds and shares with others? As the song ends, the scene fades to black.

      The film then shifts to home-movie-style, small-screen scenes of

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