‘No day but today’: Queer temporality in Rent

Through a reading of Jonathan Larson’s rock opera Rent, I explore how the genre of musical theatre ‘queers’ time. Rather than a continuously progressive temporality, I suggest that the musical comprises shifts along a continuum between a standstill and accelerated time, with the production numbers veering towards these heightened extremes. Rent advocates a powerful ‘no day but today’ mentality in the wake of crisis, bringing time to a standstill against the apocalyptic pace of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Anthems, reprises and other repetitive frameworks ‘queer’ narrative time and capture a fragmentary sense of communitas that valuably blurs the lines among characters, performers and audience members. While the genre of musical theatre may seem steeped in abstract idealism, then, performers can step out of character and spectators can join the anthem, appropriating the formal difference and the utopian openness of the musical number to a wide array of concrete social causes.