Best production of RENT you've seen?

What's your favourite production you've seen?

So far, nothing has topped the original cast in the original Broadway production. Towards the end of its run, many cast members started playing around and turning it into an ego-driven circus with the Rentheads in the front rows at the audience behaving like it was . It wasn't until the live filming that it started getting back on track again.

I was fortunate to see the OBC in May 1996, pre-Tonys, at the Nederlander.

In the years since I’ve seen the show all over the country, but it’s really hard to imagine anything topping that original experience. It was truly transcendent for me.

I saw the touring around 2006 and it was good, but the 20th Anniversary cast was great.

I've never seen anything outside of the tours of the original production so I would have to say that the best of those (to me) was the 2003 non-equity cast. It may have been because it was the height of my obsession with the show but it was during a time when the fanbase seemed to collectively agree that the Broadway production had gone a little stale with a lot of career Rent actors rotating in and out, and the non-equity production had recently reopened with a cast of energetic unknowns. The cast included a pre-Idol Constantie Maroulis as Roger, Rebecca (Pre-Naomi) Jones as Joanne (and the Mimi u/s), and later on Aaron Tveit (but I can't remember if he came along with the group that started in the 2004 cast). Again, I fully admit the nostalgia-goggles are firmly fixed to my face but not even seeing Anthony and Adam in their original roles matched that cast for me.

For perspective, I saw 3 different casts with that non-equity tour (The Collins Tour) in 2003, 2004, and 2006 (I think) in addition to the Broadway Tour with Adam Pascal, Anthony Rapp, and Gwen Stewart reprising their OBC roles, and the 20th Anniversary Tour when it opened in Lexington last year.

lucas_glenn said: "It was filmed twice, once on the actual closing date and once on August 20, 2008. Then the two filmswere mashed together."

After listening to the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack for the past week and trying to understand why this was sounding more like a rock musical I looked it up and YouTube and found this film. RENT is nothing, nothing what I imagined it to be. And it’s much more than a rock musical - more like a rock opera, I guess? Almost no talking except for the narration by Mark and minors bits here and there.

I’m going to have to watch it a couple more times before going up to Pittsburgh in two weeks to see the 20th Anniversary Tour. This will take some getting use to compared to the more traditional Broadway shows I’ve seen which had changing sets and a broad mix of extensive dialogue mixed in with the musical numbers.

Updated On: 3/18/18 at 08:38 PM