`RENT': BROADWAY'S NEW BENCHMARK.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

The irony was brutal, overwhelming in its sheer bad timing.

For 8-1/2 years, Jonathan Larson had nurtured his dreams while waiting tables in New York's Soho district. For 8-1/2 years, he'd lived the life of the fictional bohemians in his rock musical ``Rent,'' a life rich in friendship and creativity but poor in the coinage of conventional success.

By now, the rest of Larson's sad story has attained mythic proportions:

On Jan. 25, 1996, the 35-year-old composer headed home to his fourth-floor Manhattan apartment after attending ``Rent's'' final dress rehearsal. Despite a battery of technical snafus, the performance had gone well, and the invited audience of well-wishers and family went bonkers.

Larson, though worn out and complaining of chest pains, reportedly had left the theater in an upbeat mood.

Two hours later he was dead, felled by an aneurism that left a foot-long tear in the main artery that transports blood from the heart. The New York State Health Department later would impose $16,000 fines on the two Manhattan hospitals where the young playwright had gone for treatment and been misdiagnosed in the last week of his life. That would be no consolation whatsoever for Larson's grief-stricken parents and sister.

Cruelly enough, the fame that eluded Larson in life was showered on him posthumously. New York critics hailed ``Rent'' as the first grunge musical, an invigorating blast of manic Gen X energy that would do for Broadway what ``Hair'' and ``A Chorus Line'' had done in previous generations.

From there, ``Rent'' became an overnight phenomenon. A show that had spent years in development purgatory and opened at a no-frills, 150-seat East Village theater, quickly moved to Broadway, where prime orchestra seats went for $65 a pop.

What's that buzz?

``Rent'' then snagged the Pulitzer Prize for drama (only the seventh musical in history to do so) and four Tony Awards. David Geffen snapped up the recording rights, opportunistic pop singers scoped out the score for possible cover versions, Hollywood power lunchers began talking film deals, and the show's mediagenic, multi-culti cast posed for glossy fashion spreads in Vogue and Rolling Stone.

By this point, a cynic might say, Larson's brave, sweet-natured musical was in danger of becoming a shallow co-optation of the down-and-out, HIV-positive characters whose passionate noncomformity ``Rent'' celebrates.

But to those most intimately involved with its creation, ``Rent'' has proven strong enough not only to survive the hype, but the hype backlash.

``I think it's great that the show is reaching as large an audience as it's reaching,'' says Michael Greif, who directed the off-Broadway and Broadway runs before bringing ``Rent'' earlier this summer to the La Jolla Playhouse, where he serves as artistic director. On Sunday, Greif will again be directing the La Jolla cast as it opens a four-month run at the Ahmanson Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

``The show was never intended to be a protest piece. The show was never intended to be any definitive statement about any societal or social question,'' Greif continues. ``It was meant to be a love story that took place in a certain time and place. And I think it succeeds in being that love story. And I think it depicts its community and the people who live in its community with respect and affection.''

Manhattan rhapsody 

It would be difficult, indeed, for anyone to demonstrate greater affection toward the bruising magnificence of downtown Manhattan than Jonathan Larson had.

Here was a suburban kid from the golden ghetto of White Plains re-enacting the drama of his immigrant forefathers, Russian Jews who came to America in 1900. By moving back to Manhattan after he left college, Larson was reversing the pattern of white middle-class flight, rediscovering the city of Gershwin, Bernstein and Ellington, the American metropolis as a symbol of hope, a place of infinite possibility.

In ``Rent,'' Larson expresses a view of life that is unequivocally pro-urban and high-density, where community matters as much as individuality. A similar impulse lies behind several other shows that lately have pumped red corpuscles into an anemic theater scene: ``Angels in America,'' ``STOMP!'' and ``Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk.''

That spirit may explain why ``Rent'' has found an ever-widening audience - as much as the show's bittersweet love story between a struggling rock musician and a doomed junkie dancer.

As much, even, as its young creator's strange and unlucky fate.

``There's a lot of bittersweet moments during the show when you definitely think of Jonathan Larson,'' says Neil Patrick Harris of ``Doogie Howser'' fame, who plays Mark, the vaguely nerdy independent filmmaker who serves as Larson's authorial stand-in. ``But once you're there and you're watching it, it's a much larger show than that.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Rent.''

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; through Jan. 18.

Tickets: $35 to $70. Seats in the first two rows of the orchestra section will be available for $20 (cash only) two hours prior to each performance on first-come, first-served basis, limit two tickets per person. For information, call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) `RENT'

Award-winning Broadway musical brings lofty ambitions to L.A.

(2) ``Rent,'' the late Jonathan Larson's rock musical, which won a Pulitzer Prize and four Tony Awards, is now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre.

David Crane/Daily News