RENT's Life Cafe Closed and Available for Rent

According to the NY Daily News, the Life Cafe, the setting that inspired the Broadway musical RENT, has been closed since September and is now available for rent. The Alphabet City restaurant, which is where the La Vie Boheme scene takes place, is where writer Jonathan Larson penned a great deal of the iconic musical.  

Larson's father commented: “They did a lovely job of keeping Jonathan’s memory alive. They preserved the corner where he is said to have done much of his writing. We loved them for that.”

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Rent is a rock musical with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York's Lower East Side in the thriving days of Bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.

The musical was first seen in a limited three-week workshop production at New York Theatre Workshop in 1994. This same New York City off-Broadway theatre was also the musical's initial home following its official January 25, 1996 opening. The show's creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly the night before the off-Broadway premiere. The show won a Pulitzer Prize, and the production was a hit. The musical moved to Broadway's larger Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996.

On Broadway, Rent gained critical acclaim and won a Tony Award for Best Musical among other awards. The Broadway production closed on September 7, 2008 after a 12-year run of 5,124 performances, the ninth-longest-running Broadway show at the time. The production grossed over $280 million.