What he said

NYT writer Campbell Robertson arrived here in 1998 - I landed 8 years later, and I live a stone's throw from the Life Cafe.

“Rent,” (which closes in September after 12 years on Broadway ...) like all shows, it is different every time you see it. “Rent” is different in other, more peculiar ways, because it happens to be about a city that I live in.

“Rent” is about New York, far more than, say, “Chicago” is about Chicago. I have tried to think up a title that could tap as deeply into New York’s consciousness — “Car Alarm, Car Alarm,” “There’s a Very Angry Woman on the Subway,” “Class Envy!” — but nothing comes close. This is a city whose founding mythology involves not a magic spring or a she-wolf but a sweet real estate deal, one in which it’s still unclear who was bamboozling whom, making it all the more touchingly New York.

NYT