By Sophia Goold, Associate Editor
Photo source: Trinity College Dramatic Society
How do you stage a play about a time period that you never experienced?
Trinity College Dramatic Society (TCDS) recently tackled this challenge with impressive results in their production of Rent.
Written by Jonathan Larson, Rent was first performed on Broadway in 1996. Back then, the musical’s story about young artists and activists in the 1990s was contemporary. But for the cast and crew of TCDS, Rent is set in a time from before they were born. Such a discrepancy in time periods could feel intimidating, but it need not be a deterrent. Indeed, TCDS’s Rent, which ran between February 5th and 7th, 2026, proved that a historical setting can be at the heart of a theatrical production’s vitality.
Rent has a rich history of reckoning with stories from the past: the musical itself is an adaptation of Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème. Larson traded Puccini’s setting of nineteenth-century Paris for 1990s New York. The characters—a friend group of struggling young artists—are mostly kept the same, while the original plot’s backdrop of a tuberculosis outbreak is updated to the American AIDS epidemic.
Rent depicts an ensemble of characters, following their lives over two Christmas seasons as they attempt to create art, pay rent, fight gentrification and discrimination, and survive the AIDS epidemic. At the centre of the musical are roommates Mark, an aspiring filmmaker, and Roger, a musician. There’s also Roger’s girlfriend Mimi (a strip club dancer), Mark’s ex-girlfriend Maureen (a performance artist), and their friends Benny, Tom Collins, and Angel.
Since its Broadway debut, Rent has become one of the most iconic modern musicals. It has toured around the world and been produced countless times by professional and amateur theatre companies alike. TCDS’s version of Rent draws strength from this rich lineage of past productions. In my interview with the director, Kit Dixon, they discussed how they drew particular inspiration from a 2008 recording of the Broadway production of Rent. Call backs to this and other versions of the musical were most evident in the show’s choreography. Like in many other versions, in TCDS’s version of the Act 1 closing number, “La Vie Bohème,” characters dance together while sitting at, and eventually standing on, a long table. The result is a joyous and boisterous dance number that captures the characters’ bohemian lifestyle. Beyond “La Vie Bohème,” Maya Elder’s choreography work also shone through in the character of Angel (played by Juan Parra). Angel is a drag queen, and so Elder, as she explained in her interview with me, researched the dance styles of the 1990s ballroom scene to infuse Angel’s number “Today 4 U” with authentic vogue moves. Overall, the choreography of TCDS’s Rent captured the musical’s energetic tone and paid compelling homage to past dance styles and productions.
Even as it drew inspiration from previous versions of Rent, TCDS’s show was engaging for both audience members familiar with the musical and those new to it. This appeal was due in large part to multiple excellent acting performances. Rent’s cast, including the ensemble cast members, rose to the challenge of this highly character-driven show, depicting Rent’s many emotional highs and lows in both speech and song. I was particularly moved by James Higgins’s nuanced portrayal of Roger. Higgins’s impassioned vocals in “One Song Glory,” in which Roger sings about his goal to achieve musical success before succumbing to HIV, had the audience holding their breath. Also worth mentioning is Gaby Bondoc as Maureen. With their self-confident stage presence, Bondoc did Maureen’s bombastic personality justice and skillfully executed a fun moment of audience interaction during “Over the Moon.”
Beyond especially lively numbers like “La Vie Bohème,” TCDS’s production was perhaps a relatively serious rendition of Rent. The show did not lean into all of the script’s opportunities for comedy. At times, moments that I expected to garner laughter, such as when Mimi flirts with Roger by repeatedly blowing out a candle, were played with little humour.
However, what the show sacrificed in comedy, it gained in the strength of its messaging. Rent explores undeniably political issues, such as drug use and homelessness, and depicts marginalized people, especially queer characters, fighting for their safety and livelihoods. The TCDS production embraced the depictions of these issues, particularly through the set design. Set pieces and the stage walls were decorated in graffiti, which included a variety of political and social justice slogans, including ones from the present day, such as “Trans rights = human rights” and “Fuck ICE.” This somewhat anachronistic set design draws links between the issues Rent’s characters faced in the 1990s and those many people face today. The effect is clear: although Rent might be a show set in the past, it is concerned with urgent issues still very much applicable to audiences in 2026.
As Dixon pointed out to me, this topicality is especially important within the context of TCDS and U of T. In this version of Rent, the young characters were played by young adult actors. Much of the audience was of a similar age too. This similarity in age undoubtedly allowed actors to connect more deeply with their characters’ struggles, regardless of time period. Moreover, as an audience member, seeing actors and characters my age on stage drove home that the themes of Rent—of dispossession and the strength of marginalized communities in the face of it—are as relevant today as they were in the 1990s.
