SOURCE: "A Downtown 'La Bohéme'," in Newsweek, Vol. CXXVII, No. 9, February 26, 1996, p. 67.

[In the review below, Kroll focuses on the characterization in Rent.]

During rehearsals of his musical Rent, composer-writer-lyricist Jonathan Larson was told by his excited producers, "Jonathan, you're the new voice." Larson smiled: "Yeah? That's good." Hours after the dress rehearsal on Jan. 24, Larson, 35, was found dead of an aortic aneurysm in his Greenwich Village apartment. After the show's opening last week at the off-Broadway New York Theater Workshop, the new voice, now stilled, was greeted with the most feverishly enthusiastic reviews for any new American musical in many years. With tragic irony, Larson's death echoed the spirit of La Bohème, the Puccini opera about penniless young artists which was the basis of Rent. Where Puccini's heroine Mimi died, Larson has his Mimi live. Instead he perished.

There is death in Rent—death from...