SOURCE: "Hello and Goodbye," in New Yorker, Vol. LXXII, No. 1, February 19, 1996, pp. 94-6.

[Below, Lahr examines the theatrical implications of Rent's popularity, hinting at Larson's possible influence on musical theater.]

By some terrible irony, the restaurant next to the Minetta Lane Theater, where a memorial service for the composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson was held last week, is called La Bohème. Puccini's opera was the inspiration for Rent, Larson's rock opera (at the New York Theater Workshop), and the show features, among forty well-sung numbers, three songs that are as passionate, unpretentious, and powerful as anything I've heard in the musical theater for more than a decade. Larson died of an aortic aneurysm on January 25th, a few hours after the dress rehearsal of Rent. He was thirty-five. Larson's name is new to me, but his talent and his big heart are impossible to miss. His songs spill...