Students will journey through the “Seasons of Love” in MemAud on Tuesday.
The Rent 20th Anniversary Tour will perform at Ohio University at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $22 for students, $27 for senior citizens and $30 for general admission.
Rent is a rock musical written by Jonathan Larson and based on the opera La Boheme by Giacomo Puccini.
The musical is set in 1990s New York City and follows people struggling with careers and love. Rent also shows the affect the AIDS epidemic has on the characters, as some of the characters are HIV-positive or have AIDS.
Rent won four of its 10 nominations at the 1996 Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The musical also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1996.
Rent had a 12-year run on Broadway. The show opened April 29, 1996, months after the death of Larson, and closed on September 7, 2008.
Andrew Holzaepfel, the senior associate director of student activities, expected the show to sell out over the weekend because approximately 20 tickets were left as of Thursday.
Holzaepfel anticipates most of the seats to be filled by students. The musical has been performed at OU five other times, and students always come out in “full force” to see the show, he said.
“Even though it’s the 20th anniversary, I think it’s still very, very relevant to students,” Holzaepfel said. “It’s just a fun musical — like a rock musical.”
Fatma Jabbari, a second year graduate student studying political science, will be attending Rent with her roommate and it will be her first live musical.
“I’m an international student so (Rent) is something my roommate exposed me to,” she said. “I’m really happy to go see it with her.”
Jabbari watched the movie-version of Rent about a week ago, she said. The movie was released in 2005 and earned almost $30 million as of December 2005.
Bailey Watroba, a junior studying journalism, likes the storyline and the songs in Rent and is going to see it with some of her friends. Her favorite song in the musical is “La Vie Boheme” and said she listened to the song all of the time with her roommate freshman year.
“Rent is actually one of my favorite musicals,” Watroba said. “I’ve never seen it live before, but I’ve only seen the movie like a million times.”
The catchy songs that are easy to sing along to and the storyline are two aspects of Rent that might attract people to the show, Holzaepfel said. Holzaepfel might even watch the musical with the rest of the audience.
“I love this musical,” Holzaepfel said. “I don’t often sit through all of my shows because we are usually busy doing other things, but I always find that when Rent’s in town, I make an effort to be able to be in the house and see the whole show if possible.”
