New production of RENT to tour Australia in 2024

Tony Award winning musical RENT is set to tour Australia in 2024.

A new production of Jonathan Larson’s award winning and much loved musical RENT will embark on an Australian tour in 2024, opening at the Playhouse QPAC Brisbane on 27 Janaury. The show will then play dates in Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth and Canberra.

A rock musical loosely based on the opera La Bohème, RENT tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists struggling to survive and create a life in Lower Manhattan’s East Village in the thriving days of bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.

The show has music, lyrics, and book by Jonathan Larson who sadly died before it premiered off-Broadway.

Producer Lauren Peters, of LPD productions said “With RENT, Jonathan Larson unleashed a phenomenon – it would be difficult to find someone who hasn’t at least heard of it”. Peters added “RENT is the musical of the 1990s and the early-aughts but it has proved itself timeless. The characters who live in the East Village of 1990s New York navigate that which resonates so deeply with us in Australia in 2024: cost of living pressures, the threat of preventable disease, the subtle feeling that all the ways in which we can now communicate belie our disconnection. And all of this sounds terribly heavy but RENT somehow takes all this and turns it into a joyous celebration of connection, chosen family, and life itself – and it’s that joy in the face of all of life’s adversity and opportunity that is perhaps best captured in its iconic number Seasons of Love, a song which has achieved the rarest of Broadway feats and transcended the show for which it was written.”

“I can’t wait to bring RENT back to the Australian stage in this brand-new never-before-seen production This show hasn’t toured here since 1998! I feel very lucky to be a part of Jonathan Larson’s phenomenon, and I know our audiences will feel exactly the same way.”

RENT opened to critical acclaim off-Broadway in 1996. It then transfered to The Nederlander Theatre on Broadway later that year where it ran for 12 years, making it one of the longest running shows in Broadway history. On Broadway, the show gained critical acclaim and won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical. International productions soon followed including in London’s West End and Australia.

The show features iconic songs “Seasons of Love,” ”Take Me or Leave Me” and “La Vie Bohème”