Official RENT 30th Anniversary performance set for 26 October on Broadway
Original cast members and a bevy of special guests will revive the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical sensation Rent in a gala concert celebration for the show’s 30th anniversary.
The one-night-only concert of the full show will take place on 26 October at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre as a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
Rent’s original director, five-time Tony Award nominee Michael Greif, will return to direct the evening.
Greif said: “Jonathan wrote Rent in honor of the people he knew who were living and struggling with HIV and in honor of the many friends and contemporaries he lost to AIDS. I know he’d be proud and honored to join forces with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS to celebrate the 30th year anniversary of his milestone musical.”
The show’s original music director, Tim Weil, also will return, leading the entire original Rent band: Kenny Brescia, Stephanie Mack, Jeff Potter and Daniel A. Weiss.
Special guest performers will be announced in the coming weeks.
The poster art for the 30th anniversary concert has been designed by Naomi Mizusaki, who created the show’s first iconic ad, and Drew Hodges, who led the original design team for Rent.
Drew Hodges said: “I really wanted to make something that has the spirit of the original, something as disruptive as the first. That ad was as if the characters of Mark, Roger, Mimi, Angel, Collins, Maureen and Joann used a typewriter and Xerox machine to make their own ad. So, we thought about what poster those same characters would make for the 30th, and built it on top of that first ad. We also wanted to make something that people who love Rent might keep and frame.”