Rent to Have One-Night-Only Concert on Broadway, Says OG Musical Director Tim Weil

Before Hamilton, Broadway had Rent, the rare show that transcends mere Broadway success to become a cultural touchstone, changing the industry and truly permeating the mainstream zeitgeist. The show is most noted for bringing '90s-style rock music to Broadway, giving a modern spin to Puccini's classic opera La Bohéme—but with electric guitars subbing for woodwinds and AIDS taking the place of tuberculosis.

And making the show's creation even more extraordinary was the sudden and tragic death of composer Jonathan Larson, the night before the largely undiscovered talent's musical was scheduled to give the first preview performance of Rent Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. The loss—from an aortic dissection thought to be the result of undiagnosed Marfan syndrome at the age of 35—put the creative team of Rent in the hardest of spots. They were faced with finishing the musical without its wunderkind writer. And not just any musical, a musical that would go on to become Tony- and Pulitzer-winning, and a major landmark in Broadway and music history.

A part of the team tasked with that unimaginable job was music director Tim Weil, who would go on to become the steward of the show's music department across a Broadway transfer, national tours, and more; he also led the band onstage at the Nederlander Theatre for nearly a decade. Thirty years later, Weil has memorialized that heady time in his life and career with a memoir, Making Rent: The Story Behind The Music That Changed Broadway, out now from Apollo Publishers.

While helping to create the rock opera, Weil had a front-row seat for a new style of music coming to Broadway the first time, a moment that saw much of the industry scrambling to learn a completely new style of performing. Weil coached the musical's legendary original cast—then largely unknowns Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Jesse L. Martin, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Idina Menzel, Fredi Walker, and Taye Diggs. He then watched while everybody else raced to catch up with that cast's often freak of nature–level talent as the show found actors for replacements and new stagings.

Playbill caught up with Weil over Zoom to talk about all of that and more—including our first official whispers of an upcoming one-night-only reunion concert on Broadway. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I have to start off by telling you I saw your 10,000th performance on Broadway—I forever remember because my Playbill got a special gold sticker! I was an aspiring music director then, so I remember watching you and your band a lot. What I remember most is that you did the whole show without any printed music.
Tim Weil: Yeah! That would have been right near the end of my time with the Broadway show. When I still had music up, it was really just a crutch. By then, including the workshops and earlier stuff we did pre-Broadway, I had been doing the show for about 10 years.

Tell us how Rent originally came into your life.
They were working on it at New York Theatre Workshop, and they were looking for audition pianists for what I just knew as some new rock opera. I thought they were calling for a music director, but they were looking for audition pianists, for like $10 an hour. My heart sank, but I needed the money, so it only sank for a second. I was subbing The Who's Tommy at the time, so I was very in the rock opera headspace.

Other than Tommy, what was your connection to rock music at that time, as opposed to more traditional musical theatre fare?
I grew up as a rock, jazz, R&B guy. Having my career in New York is when I discovered the theatre and really fell in love with it. My gateway drug, luckily, was Sondheim. That stuff, if you’re a musician, it’s as appealing to you as if you’re a lyricist, as if you’re a dramatist. So I had a parallel, evenly balanced track between life as a freelance rock-and-roll, R&B musician as I did music directing in the theatre.

Rock plus Sondheim—sounds like you’re talking about Jonathan Larson’s background.
Once I came onboard as the music director, that was the thing that bonded us. I think hearing me play audition piano for all these people doing rock and pop and R&B songs, I think Jonathan realized I was a guy whose tastes aligned with his. And I think [director] Michael Greif was realizing I would help these people sing better.

Rock music is kind of infamously rough to play on a solo piano. What do you think made you especially adept at that?
I know the elements that you need, and I know how to groove. I’m a percussive player. I can be lyrical if called upon, but the piano is a percussion instrument, so I utlize that aspect to its full advantage.

How much did you see the show change from when you first joined the project up until the finished version?
What Jonathan was writing was hard. It was constantly evolving and changing. Jonathan was really good at structure and shaping and guiding, and he saw his work almost like the balance of objectivity and what he had to do, and the subjectivity of what he liked, and what he wanted it to sound like. He struck an amazing balance with that. I think he must have written well over 100 songs over the course of the year and a half, two years that we were working together—versus the 40, 41 songs that made it to the final version. I’ve been thinking of that writing this book. I think the book is about 260 pages, and I probably wrote closer to 700. In both cases, the Thing finds itself only through diligence and hard work and collaboration and artistry.

What percent finished would you call the show, or do you think Jonathan would call the show, when he died?
He knew it wasn’t finished. We had a list of things to work on. But what we discovered, Michael and I and the company, was that he had left us the entire treasure map. We just had to figure out how to get to the buried treasure through our work and the various cuts we made. Mine were purely musical. Michael’s were a little more structural, shaping and pacing and getting it down to its bare essentials, which is character-driven, plot-driven, contemporary musical theatre.

Do you feel you were able to get to a version of the show Jonathan would have liked, or do you have regrets that he didn’t get to finish it?
I’m not one to say that I wish things could have been better. I think it was all exactly what it was supposed to be, and I think Jonathan completed his work here on Earth. It’s sad to think of what might have been. But what did happen was a lot.

What kind of pressure did his death put on you as the official steward of his now final work, and while you are personally grieving this horrible tragedy, too.
What it did is make us hyper focused, hyper vigilant, hyper purposeful. Our job as professionals was always to create a good musical, but now we had another big reason to do it, which was for Jonathan and his family. People have asked if anyone ever cracked jokes to lighten the mood. There was nothing funny going on in those weeks after Jonathan died. The whole company was just using getting this show ready as their distraction.

It must have been such a coping mechanism.
I can’t speak for the actors. I know for me that without the work, I would have been lost. We found out later that Jonathan had told his friends he wanted us to complete the work. We heard that from his family and friends. That alone was encouraging, and really helped propel us to do right by him, and for ourselves, frankly. People throw around the word “family” in companies of actors. But the Rent family was family. Shock and grief are probably the most toxic, emotional stew that you can come up with. To have the work to fall back on as you’re sitting in that stew was a real comfort.

What do you think made Rent special?
When I was still the audition pianist, Jonathan gave me a few of the demos of songs from the show. The first thing I ever thought about him was, "Oh my God, this guy has an original musical voice. Very post-modern, contemporary pop, like The Police." “What You Own” is very much in that alt-rock early ‘90s, not full-on grunge, but pushing that way. I loved his voice, and his lyrics were so clever, the internal rhymes, the plays on words, the irony—it was just so sophisticated. I’m not going to put him right there with Sondheim, but it was the same elements that I love about Sondheim’s lyrics. It’s just a different musical tapestry.

What was it like finding people who could sing this then, before this style of singing was more common in the theatre?
Yeah, we’d had decades and decades of traditional musical theatre singing, and that’s what everybody was studying. It was purely to Bernie Telsey’s credit and their creativity as a young casting agency that they rooted out these singers who could also act, because they were few and far between. It was difficult to cast the original and even our first national tour, because it came out so quickly after the Broadway show happened—I think we cast it nine months later. 

Fast forward to today, and everybody since 1996 has had this as part of their training, singing radio music. It was hard when we started because the people that were entering musical theatre, that wasn’t the music they were training and listening to and studying. Now it’s everywhere, and I think Rent is a big part of that. I could go down the list of musicals from 1996 to now, and a significant percentage of shows that are out there, whether commercial Broadway musicals or Off-Broadway musicals, there is a serious amount of rock and pop and rap and R&B and Latin music and all that sort of stuff out there.

It strikes me that people in 1996 wouldn’t have been trained to do it, but even the people that do sing that way might not necessarily have been ready to be doing it eight times a week, too.
Yes. We were up against that a lot. But actors, singers, are resourceful. They figure it out. A lot of them started studying formally. I was able to help as a vocal coach, but I’m not a voice teacher. And there were cases where some people just couldn’t cut it. Especially once we got to tours, we had these young rock and roll musicians doing this big, hit show, making great money, and they’re 22 years old and travelling the country, the world. And they realize they can’t be ready to do this eight times a week because they like the other part of that life. I had to have a handful of frank conversations with some people over the years, to say, "You’re great but maybe this world isn’t right for you. Maybe you should go sing great in a bar band three nights a week—no judgement." People find out what they can do.

What do you think is most important for singers to remember when working on material like this?
What I come back to the most often is that your consonants are your best friends. That’s not necessarily a widely held belief in rock world. I have seen it work time and time and time again. Because what happens is, if you attack your consonants, it’s going to automatically lift your soft palate. That’s what the voice teachers want, and consonants are the diving board, the springboard by which you get your soft palate up. All of a sudden you’re resonating better because you’re making very good consonant production.

The other thing is to really pay attention to the rhythm. People will riff, but it has to be dramatic substance over vocal styling. Do what the rhythms tell you to do, because that’s why the composer wrote them that way.

See, I find that so interesting, because a lot of times music like this is not written on the page super rhythmically as post people actually perform it.
You’d be surprised in Rent, if you go back and listen to the record, how locked in to the rhythms that Jonathan wrote we are. We were so locked in, but it sounds like everybody is just free wheeling it. But no, we were true to his work.

Talk to me about your original band.
The great thing about the Rent band was—Jonathan wrote the music, and Steve Skinner orchestrated it in his studio. But for the band, we put that all together. It was the product of who we all were as musicians. With a great band, that sum is so much greater than its parts, and we were that band. Jonathan and Michael and everyone took the band and the music seriously. They thought of us as the 16th character in the musical. That’s why we were visible, why the lead guitar player is the most up center and visible. Jonathan viewed the lead guitar as the musical voice of Roger. Something about Rent as a piece, there’s an element of it that gives a respect, a newfound respect to a type of music that I hadn’t seen in the theatre before.

What has it been like watching the incredible journey this show has gone on in the years since it premiered?
It’s great to see it. I love to see other people’s takes on it. And I never tire of seeing people experience it in the audience. And onstage, I never tire of watching musicians play it, because it’s non-stop. I am so grateful to have this show as the centerpiece of my musical theatre life.

So now you’ve written this book about the whole experience. What surprised you about that process?
What surprised me is how it all came pouring out of me, and how much I still remembered after so many years. I did a ton of interviews, just to double check my own memory and see where our memories intersected. I think the thing that I was most amazed about is how much detail I remembered. At the time, I was in my mid to late 30s and my musicianship and memory were firing on all cylinders. It was a time in my life where I just remembered everything—including, by the way, still all of the Rent music by heart.

If you get the call 10 minutes to curtain that they need you to play it, you can just sit down and go?
Oh I could drop into any show any time and play it. I have no doubt about it. And by the way, I can tell you that there is going to be a live concert performance of Rent this year. I’ve been given permission to say that it’s happening in New York at a Broadway theatre, a one night only. And Tim Weil will be on the keys, and with the entire original Rent band.

Can't wait to hear more about that!

Buy Making Rent: The Story Behind the Music That Changed Broadway at Amazon here.