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Character Analysis Of Rent

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The musical Rent was first produced in 1994 by Jonathan Larson and is loosely based on the opera La Boheme (1896) by Giacomo Puccini. This rock opera production tells the story of the lives of 8 bohemians living in Manhattan for a year. Many of the characters in Rent are pulled directly from Puccini's La Bohème. There are 8 main characters the story follows; Roger Davis, a musician who is HIV positive, Mimi Márquez, an exotic dancer and Roger's girlfriend, Mark Cohen, a Jewish filmmaker who is Roger’s roommate, Maureen Johnson, a bisexual performance artist, Joanne Jefferson, a lawyer who is Maureen's girlfriend, Tom Collins, a gay part-time philosophy professor at New York University with AIDS. Angel Dumott Schunard, a drag queen who is Collins' partner, and Benjamin 'Benny' Coffin III, their landlord and the former roommate of Roger, Mark, Collins, and Maureen. The plot of Rent borrows heavily from its predecessor. La Boheme was also based on young artists and free-thinkers, and these characters were afflicted with the plague of the time period, tuberculosis. Similarly, in Rent the artists are all affected in some way by the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the 1990s. The story highlights the two roommates Mark and Roger. A former tragedy has made Roger numb to life, and Mark tries to capture the ups and downs of his friend’s lives on tape through his attempts to make a film.
The beginning of the film opens up to the main characters struggling to make their rent. The rest of

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