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Broadway rush, lottery and standing-room-only tickets would not be what they are today if it hadn’t been for the musical Rent.
During the cast’s 30th anniversary reunion at The Festival over the weekend in Kingston, New York, 13 of the 15 original Broadway cast members looked back on Rent’s early days, including how fans would line up in droves to score discounted $20 tickets.
Gwen Stewart — who played Mrs. Jefferson, the bag lady and the “Seasons of Love” soloist as part of the Rent ensemble — said some of the people who once lined up outside the Nederlander Theatre were at the weekend-long event at Hutton Brickyards.
Seeing them “warms my heart because it was 30 years ago,” she said. “It was young people, it was old people, it was middle-aged people. It was Black, it was white. It was just everybody on the line wanting to see Rent for the first or 50th time.”
During Stewart’s time in Rent, she was so touched by the fan response that she started “picking up boxes of donuts and bottles of water to bring to the line,” she revealed, noting that theatergoers would show up in the “sweltering heat” or “freezing cold” just to get tickets.
“They wanted to see this show that was touching people on a very deep level,” she said. “And that touched me. So I spent my Rent money to be of help and of service to those people.”
Daphne Rubin-Vega, Broadway’s original Mimi Marquez, said it was actually the cast’s idea to make sure young people like themselves would be able to have access to the show.
Because Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning musical was making money and becoming such a huge success — and its creator had tragically just died — she said something “was not feeling clean” about the show being so profitable without the people it represented being able to afford it.
“We made a stink,” Rubin-Vega said, explaining that they fought for the rush policy. “We used to make stinks then.”
Gilles Chiasson, the “Will I?” soloist and other roles in Rent, said “it’s important to remember” that the musical was playing at a time before there was social media like there is today.
“That was the beginning of AOL and chat rooms,” he noted. “The only way to interact with the show was you had to come to be there. And the vibrancy of the people in the line was because that was the only way to connect.”
“In the line, they weren’t texting,” added cast member Rodney Hicks. “They weren’t looking at social media. They were communicating with one another and building their own community.”
“They were, in essence, a part — an extension — of Rent,” he added. “They were the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th character in our show. And they built a community. These people slept out in sleeping bags in the cold … It wasn’t safe at all, but they built a community that I believe has lasted these 30 years. Just today, people were saying how they met their partners, their husbands, their wives in this line. So thank you, Jonathan Larson.”
At the reunion — which happened to take place on the birthday of Larson’s late father, Allan Larson — the cast reminisced about their Off-Broadway run, how Larson would call them late at night to share new details of the writing process, hearing the music for the first time and more.
Read BroadwayWorld’s full recap of The Festival here.
Photo Credit: Austin Ruffer
