RENT is a rock musical written by Jonathan Larson and based off of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La boheme. The story follows a group of impoverished young people living under the shadow of the AIDS crisis while trying to make their way in the world. In our production of RENT, we made a point of exploring the lives of people from all walks of life who were struggling during such a turbulent time in New York’s history. Our goal was to create characters who felt authentic, as if pulled directly from a photograph of New York in the early 1990s.