“Rent” undoubtedly will be the first musical in years to reach a non-theater audience, as pop artists line up to cover the songs from a score that overflows with great numbers. With Alan Menken - the best post-Sondheim composer the theater has produced - long since lost to Disney, the tragedy of Larson’s death is a public as well as a private one, for no one else has shown such promise in restoring the theater’s preeminence as a source of popular music. Though “Rent,” the better work, also boasts an anti-Establishment attitude, it, too, will fit right in there. That catholicity has been the hallmark of Broadway’s greatest composers from Irving Berlin to Richard Rodgers to Stephen Sondheim it’s worth noting that “Rent” opened within days of a star-driven revival of Sondheim’s first show as composer/lyricist, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.””Forum” was a spoof of musical-comedy conventions perfectly at home on Broadway. Larson, on the cusp of 36 when he died of an aortic aneurysm, wrote songs in a wide range of pop idioms, from rock anthems and ballads to gospel to loping Western laments to old-fashioned Broadway show-stoppers. The final musical entry in the 1995-96 season, “Rent” is the best show in years, if not decades.
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