Broadway Hit ‘Rent’ Is Due at the Ahmanson

The Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical “Rent” will open the Ahmanson Theatre’s 1997-98 season in September and will play there at least 16 weeks, through January of 1998, theater officials announced Monday.

“Rent” will come to Los Angeles from its previously announced summer engagement at the La Jolla Playhouse.

Inspired by Puccini’s “La Boheme” and created by Jonathan Larson--who died hours after the show’s final dress rehearsal off-Broadway in January--”Rent” is about a community of young people in contemporary New York. It opened at the New York Theatre Workshop in February and transferred to Broadway in April.

The West Coast production will be directed by La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Michael Greif, who directed the original. After Los Angeles, it will move on to other cities, including San Francisco in the spring. Co-producer Jeffrey Seller said the tour probably will stop at the Orange County Performing Arts Center “but we don’t know when yet.”

In moving to the Ahmanson, the producers chose a limited engagement over an open-ended L.A. run, as the Ahmanson is committed to a four-show subscription season. Seller said the company hopes to extend its 16 weeks to a maximum of 20 at the Ahmanson and then, “if it’s a fabulous success, we can come back to L.A. later.”

“We don’t want to count our chickens before they’re hatched,” Seller said. The “Rent” producers’ caution contrasts with “Ragtime” producer Garth Drabinsky’s decision, announced last week, to try to give that show an open-ended run at the Shubert Theatre beginning in June.

Furthermore, the Ahmanson was “the best fit” for “Rent” in terms of sight-lines and acoustics, Seller said. He also likes the theater’s flexible seating capacity. He said the exact number of seats to be sold hasn’t been determined, but he predicts that it will fall somewhere between 1,626 (the current standard for spoken drama there) and the 2,000-plus usually used for musicals.

Some had speculated that the 1,000-seat Doolittle Theatre was a likely site for “Rent” but it’s too small, Seller said. “You can’t mount a full Broadway show there and make financial sense.” “Rent” currently is playing in a 1,195-seat theater on Broadway.

Seller emphasized that the L.A. “Rent” won’t “clone” the New York production. “We want each company to have a unique flavor,” to the extent that costumes are designed fresh for each new set of actors, he said. The set and lighting remain the same.

He declined to disclose the budget for the West Coast production. “Our show is not about money,” he said. “It’s about people.”