'Rent' Returns To New York Stage For 20th Anniversary: How To Get Tickets

On the eve of the 20^th anniversary of its opening, the award-winning Broadway musical “Rent” is set to return to New York City, according to Playbill. The show will be put on at The Secret Theatre in Long Island City starting on Sept. 23.

The latest production of “Rent,” which won both the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1996, will be presented by the 5^th Floor Theatre Company, which has produced New York City productions of “Debbie Does Dallas” and “Urinetown.” “Rent” went to Broadway in April 1996 after its first opening off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop on Jan. 25, 1996.

Performances are set for Sept. 23 to Sept. 27. General admission is currently running at $25.

With 5,123 Broadway performances, “Rent” is the 10^th longest-running show in Broadway history, according to Playbill. Produced in multiple countries, the show has seen massive success, something its creator, Jonathan Larson, never saw with his own eyes. He died unexpectedly the same day as the show's first preview off-Broadway. The show was also adapted into a movie in 2005.

Inspired by Giacomo Puccini’s opera “La bohème,” Rent tells the story of a group of bohemian artists in New York City’s Alphabet City in the late 1980’s, many of whom are HIV-positive or live with AIDS. The characters struggle to maintain friendships, find love and keep their non-conformist artistic attitudes amid the grim specter of AIDS, poverty and drug addiction.

While new cast members will play the show’s characters, “Rent” helped launch some of Broadway’s biggest careers, such as Taye Diggs, currently performing as Hedwig in the Broadway production of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and Idina Menzel, who starred in the award-winning Broadway show “Wicked” and voiced the part of Queen Elsa in the Disney animated film “Frozen.”