Downsizing Rent For A New Run Off Broadway

Three years after its Broadway run ended, the musical “Rent” is returning to New York, this time Off Broadway. Continue reading after the jump.

@capriSUNshine

Most theater artists usually let a good decade pass before reviving popular titles in New York, and when they do, they usually build the revival around a fresh concept, a star or some other artistic justification.

Instead, this production’s backers forthrightly acknowledged that their main motives for reviving “Rent” so soon were profit and their own sentimentality.

“Theater is a business and we do it to make money, and I’m a producer and I have to make a living, and we have a director who needs to make a living, and we have actors who act to make a living,” said Jeffrey Seller, a lead producer of the original 1996 production, which moved swiftly from New York Theater Workshop to Broadway, and the revival, which opens on Thursday.

“There’s integrity in that,” Mr. Seller continued. “We’re providing something of use to society, not just employment but a piece of art that I’ve heard over and over people say they wish they could see again in New York or take their kids to see.”

Michael Greif, the director, said he signed up immediately for the revival without any desire to subvert or reinterpret the work beyond a fresh look at the sets, costumes, choreography and other physical elements.

“After ‘Rent’ closed, I’d quickly come to miss it,” he said. “I just thought it should be a show that was always in New York for people to see.”

“Rent,” already a reconception of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème,” about friends and lovers grappling with art, AIDS and life in the East Village, was a critical and commercial sensation in the late 1990s. It won four Tony Awards, including best musical, and generated popular tours in the United States, Japan and South Korea. Europeans, for whatever reason, were “strangely chillier” to the show, said Allan S. Gordon, another lead producer of the show then and now.

The producers ended the Broadway run in 2008 when weekly operating costs — about $350,000 — were exceeding weekly revenues, Mr. Seller said. The show had been profitable for years, but Mr. Seller said that the producers neither wanted to eat into those profits to keep the show going nor to subject the cast to the depressing experience of performing in half-empty theaters.

Fittingly, perhaps, given the show’s title, the sharpest difference between the latest Off Broadway production and the one on Broadway is money. The new Off Broadway production cost $1.5 million to mount compared with $3.5 million for the Broadway production in 1996. The weekly running costs of “Rent” in its current 499-seat theater at New World Stages are $115,000, or about one-third of the nut on Broadway. The potential gross, meanwhile, is in the mid-$200,000 range each week (depending on ticket pricing). “Rent” has been earning weekly profits since preview performances began in July and has $400,000 in advance ticket sales, Mr. Seller said.

The producers’ business strategy — to reap profits off of a well-known brand in a less-costly market, like television reruns in syndication — is perhaps most evident in the advertising budget for the new “Rent.” Mr. Seller said the budget is $15,000 a week, compared with the budgets of $50,000 to $100,000 of many new Broadway musicals seeking to lure ticket buyers.

Even the typeface on posters and programs for this “Rent” remains the same as the original; to use a new design, Mr. Seller said, might suggest that this was an unrecognizable “Rent.”

“When George Lucas puts out 3-D ‘Star Wars,’ he’s not going to change the logo,” Mr. Seller said. “And when we do ‘Rent’ Off Broadway, we’re not going to change the logo.”

Many of the creative changes that Mr. Greif did pursue are intended to create some artistic distance from the Broadway production, though some of those tweaks wink at the original too. The more intimate theater and the cast of young, unknown actors — just as the original cast members, including Idina Menzel and Anthony Rapp, once were — add dashes of freshness to the production.

LAT