Sondheim........could he really? — Page 2

Spider, I understand that most of the RENT 'fanatics' you talk to are around your age. My question would be, what are the demographics of the audiences for the show in general. I have a feeling they skew much older, and that is what Margo is refering to.

Hey now, Spider, having your thoughts and questions taken seriously and addressed is a GOOD thing! Would you rather they were dismissed or ridiculed? You have NOTHING to be sorry for - I just hope that in the end your questions are answered.

Updated On: 9/5/04 at 01:34 AM

It was a good question, spider, and open-ended enough to leave room for a few interesting interpretations.

It's not a little post -- you asked an excellent question and raised a very intelligent issue that I think eludes most people. While may seem to you that "Rent" is a show only for teenagers and 20-somethings, gays, bi-s, etc... (and sure, that is perhaps the core audience), the fact is that there is no possible way that it would STILL be running nearly 3500 performances later (one of the top ten runs in the history of Broadway) if the under-30 crowd was the only one that responded to it. A significant portion of the straight, white, heterosexual, "older" traditional audience must have responded to this show or else it would have closed long ago. They probably haven't seen it dozens of times, but they're the ones that pay to see it for full-price and enough of them do so to keep the show running year after year.

The so-called real youth-oriented shows typically burn through their potential audience in a year or two (Hedwig, Rocky Horror, Tommy). ANY show that can run 8 and a half years on Broadway (with no clear signs closing soon) clearly has an appeal far beyond the "youth-market" (which cannot sustain a long run on its own) and must be attracting very large numbers of 40-somethings, 50-somethings and, yes even a few 60-somethings, the folks from Jersey and Long Island as well as the tourists from around the country and around the world -- I'm sorry there just aren't enough teenage Rentheads to explain it otherwise........ Larson wrote a score that screamed "ROCK" to his core audience, but wasn't so "ROCK" that it turned off everyone else (as, I think "Hedwig" did) and was accessible enough to the typical average theatregoer, which is why it's going end up running (despite the gay subject matter, etc..) longer than almost all of the safest and tamest Broadway hits of the last several decades.

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i just read something in an artical online-

"In class, Jonathan studied the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brook. Among his musical influences were JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, the Beatles, Prince, and the Police, ***but the writer he admired most was Stephen Sondheim, to whom he wrote during his last year in college. The distinguished composer-lyricist answered him and became an adviser to the young songwriter.***"

Spider, Sondheim knows from whence this kind of 'mentoring' came, since Hammerstein did the same for him, picking apart some of Sondheim's first efforts and teaching him in the process.

We'll never know where Larsen could have gone if he'd stayed with us longer, but there are other composers out there and we need to encourage them...the risks that they need to take to grow are often discouraged by those who have to put money into a show, but that is how art evolves.

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