One final ‘Season of Love’

PUBLISHED by Boston Metro

Adam Pascal on reprising his role in ‘Rent’

“Rent” may have left Broadway, but bohemia’s not dead. The production is touring across America this summer for one more season of love with two of its original cast members.




Also stars from the movie version, Anthony Rapp returns to play amateur filmmaker Mark and Adam Pascal will reprise his role as Roger, a sulky musician. After leaving the show in 1997, Pascal says he and Rapp enjoyed filming the 2005 movie so much that they decided to lead the tour.

“We both longed for, in a way, the opportunity to finish out our ‘Rent’ journey on stage where it began,” says Pascal.

If you’re not among the millions who have seen the show in some incarnation, “Rent” is based on Puccini’s opera, “La Boheme” and follows the journey of seven young friends as they struggle with heartbreak, greedy landlords and the AIDS epidemic.

Though AIDS is no longer the death sentence it was when the show first began in the mid ’90s, Pascal says the show’s core is still just as much, if not more, relevant to today’s audience than it was more than a decade ago.

“The show deals with crisis,” he says. “The concept of age is not important. People are feeling anxious these days because of the economy and wars; I think there’s a resonance.”

Once the run is over, however, Pascal and Rapp will hang up the Doc Martens for good.

“This tour has been the most fun that I’ve had performing in the show,” says Pascal. “In a way, it will be hard. Hopefully we all grow and move on in our career to do other things that mean something to us.”

Pascal and Rapp have already grown quite a bit since they first performed in “Rent,” some might even say they’re a little old for the 20 something roles they play. Pascal says he believes he now brings “more maturity and depth to performance.”

“We’ve both had 13 years to grow as human beings.”


‘Rent:’ The Broadway Tour
Through July 26
The Colonial Theatre
106 Boylston St., Boston
MBTA: Green Line to Boylston
www.broadwayacrossamerica.com