When Art Becomes Lifeline: RENT at North Shore Music Theatre Matters More Than Ever

A Show Born from Crisis, Speaking to Crisis

When North Shore Music Theatre announced RENT as part of its 70th Anniversary Season, running September 16-28, 2025, they weren’t just programming a beloved musical. They were offering Essex County a mirror, a megaphone, and perhaps most importantly, a gathering place for communities under siege.

RENT, which follows seven friends navigating life in New York City during the AIDS epidemic of 1989-1990, has always been more than entertainment. Four of its main characters are HIV positive. All of them are fighting for their right to exist, create, and love in a world that seems determined to erase them. When it debuted on Broadway in 1996, RENT brought the stories of queer young people during the AIDS crisis to mainstream stages, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and four Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Now, RENT at North Shore Music Theatre will share these vital stories with audiences in Essex County.

Nearly three decades later, director and choreographer Marcos Santana will bring this story to Beverly’s iconic theater-in-the-round. “Throughout the years, Rent has consistently been one of the most requested titles from audiences,” NSMT leadership has noted. The timing of this production feels less like a coincidence and more like a necessity.

The Echoes Are Deafening

The parallels between RENT’s world and our current moment are impossible to ignore. Where the musical’s characters faced the AIDS crisis and societal rejection, today’s LGBTQ+ communities face an unprecedented legislative assault. Nearly 120 anti-trans and anti-LBGTQ+ bills have already been filed across states nationwide before 2025 has even begun, surpassing the 80 bills filed by this time in 2023.

The statistics paint a stark picture: 93% of transgender youth ages 13-17 in the United States—an estimated 280,300 young people—now live in states that have passed or proposed laws restricting their rights. Half of all U.S. states prohibit transgender girls from playing school sports. Half have banned or criminalized medically indicated healthcare for trans youth. These laws have directly caused suicide attempt rates to increase by up to 72% in some states.

Project 2025 threatens to erase LGBTQ+ people from federal protections altogether. The systematic nature of these attacks eerily mirrors the institutional abandonment that characterized the early AIDS crisis—the same abandonment that RENT’s characters fought against with chosen family, mutual aid, and fierce love.

When Home Becomes a Luxury

RENT’s other central crisis—the gentrification displacing artists from their homes and communities—resonates with painful clarity for today’s creative communities. Artists nationwide are struggling to find affordable housing and studio space as prices skyrocket. The cruel irony that artists often fuel gentrification, only to be displaced by it, is a recurring theme in cities across America. Denver, ranked the #2 most gentrified city in the United States in 2020, has seen artists and BIPOC community members particularly displaced.

Here on the North Shore, our creative community knows these struggles intimately. The makers, performers, and creators who give our region its vibrancy increasingly find themselves priced out of the very neighborhoods they helped enliven. RENT’s famous “La Vie Bohème” isn’t just a celebration of artistic life—it’s a defiant anthem for those who insist on creating despite economic systems designed to crush them.

Why Representation Is Resistance

In times of oppression, visibility becomes a matter of life and death. When legislative bodies attempt to legislate LGBTQ+ people out of existence, seeing these stories on stage becomes an act of resistance. RENT doesn’t just tell queer stories; it centers them, celebrates them, and refuses to sanitize them for comfort.

For young LGBTQ+ people planning to see RENT at North Shore Music Theatre—especially those watching their rights being debated and stripped away—seeing themselves reflected on NSMT’s stage offers something essential: proof that they belong, that their stories matter, that their love is worth celebrating. In a cultural moment where some seek to ban books, restrict healthcare, and erase identities, theater becomes a sanctuary.

It’s worth noting that young people facing these challenges don’t have to navigate them alone. NAGLY (The North Shore Alliance of LGBTQ+ Youth) offers essential support services, including peer support groups, educational programs, and safe spaces, for LGBTQ+ youth and their families throughout the North Shore. Organizations like NAGLY ensure that the chosen family and community support depicted in RENT exists in real life for those who need it most.

The Power of Chosen Family

Perhaps RENT’s most enduring message is its portrait of chosen family—the bonds we create when biological family or society rejects us, the communities we build when existing structures fail us.

When artists face housing crises, communities share resources to support one another. When someone faces discrimination, others rally to their support. When success comes, we celebrate together. This is the same spirit that animates RENT’s characters as they face impossible odds: the understanding that collective care is revolutionary, that supporting one another is both a survival strategy and a sacred act. Creative Collective members understand this deeply—that sustainable creative practice requires supporting not just the art or business, but the whole human behind it.

Art as Catharsis, Theater as Church

Artists across the country are recognized as providing essential work that offers catharsis in times of turmoil. North Shore Music Theatre, having captivated audiences since 1955, takes this responsibility seriously. By bringing RENT to North Shore Music Theatre now, they’re offering more than entertainment—they’re providing a space for grief, rage, joy, and hope to coexist.

The show’s central message—that in the face of adversity and hate, one can choose love and live in the moment—isn’t naive optimism. It’s battle-tested wisdom from communities who’ve survived systematic attempts at erasure. It’s the same wisdom our creative community needs now as we face our own struggles for survival and dignity.

Building the World We Need

RENT asks its famous question: “How do you measure a year?” In 2025, we might measure it in anti-LBGTQ+ bills filed, in transgender youth protected or abandoned, in artists displaced or supported, in communities fractured or strengthened. But RENT also offers its own answer: measure your life in love.

This isn’t sentimentality—it’s strategy. The love RENT depicts is active, political, and transformative. It’s the love that creates mutual aid networks, that fights for access to medication, that shares resources, that refuses to let anyone disappear. It’s the love that North Shore creatives practice when we advocate for one another, amplify each other’s work, and insist that sustainable creative practice requires supporting the whole person.

The Call to Gather

When RENT at North Shore Music Theatre opens this September, it won’t just be a production—it will be a gathering—a gathering of those who refuse to be erased. A gathering of those who believe art can change hearts and minds. A gathering of those who understand that in times of crisis, community isn’t optional—it’s oxygen.

Supporting this production means more than buying a ticket. It means supporting cultural institutions that dare to program challenging work. It means showing up for LGBTQ+ community members who need to see themselves reflected and celebrated. It means using our collective power to ensure that stories of resilience and resistance reach those who need them most.

Join the Resistance Through Art

RENT at North Shore Music Theatre runs September 16-28, 2025. Tickets and information are available at nsmt.org. Group sales are available for those who wish to attend together and can be arranged through the box office.

But supporting this production is just the beginning. As creative community builders, we have the power to ensure that the themes RENT explores—chosen family, mutual support, resilience through art—extend beyond the theater walls. Whether that means advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, supporting artists facing displacement, or simply checking in on community members who might be struggling, we all have a role to play.

In RENT’s words, “There’s only us, there’s only this.” In 2025, on the North Shore, in the face of challenges that echo those of decades past, we choose us. We choose this. We choose love.

Creative Collective supports Essex County’s creative community through comprehensive business services while honoring the whole person. We believe that art isn’t separate from advocacy, that business isn’t separate from humanity, and that none of us rise alone.