Rent's Price of Admission
Are Mature-Content Musicals Ready for High School?
Dirty needles. Cross dressers. Pole dancing. Just another day in the high-school auditorium.
After 12 years of rocking and shocking Broadway, the hit musical Rent is exploding onto high-school stages across America. The New York Times reports that more than 40 schools plan to stage the rock opera this spring. But some parents and principals are squeamish over the show's racy content, and productions in California, Texas, and West Virginia have been canceled.
The play is actually Rent: School Edition, a somewhat milder version of the original. The profanity has been cut -- but the provocative plot remains in tact.
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and three Tony Awards, Rent is Jonathan Larson's turn-of-the-21st-Century take on the classic opera La Bohème. It tracks a year in the life of a loose-knit clan of starving artists grappling with poverty, disease, and romance in New York's East Village.
In La Bohème, the heroine is a frail seamstress suffering from consumption; in Rent, she's a smack-addicted go-go dancer with HIV. If that's not enough to get a parent's trousers in a twist, there are (gasp) gay, bisexual, and transvestite characters.
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