A lot of them used to open on the road, now they open Off-Broadway.... Their whole idea is to have them on the road after Broadway. Or while Broadway is in existence, because that is a tremendous appeal to people. That means it made it. We sold 200,000 tickets [in Boston]. So it's been rather successful. And if things continue the way they are, we'll probably stay a little bit longer before we go to St. Paul.

Actually, I heard that people were disappointed about its being taken to Broadway because they thought that the original venue sort of fit the "feel" of it more, the sort of rundown bohemia.

First of all, I like it better at the Broadway theater. For real. The Nederlander Theater is not exactly a pristine theater. It's not the Shubert. And in one sense, it does recreate the theater downtown. It's very, very similar. I think it plays better in an 11 or 12 hundred-seat theater than a 200-seat theater. And if it didn't, I would tell you. There's no question we were concerned, when we were moving the play, that first of all we were moving it out of the area that it was born in and that it characterized. And the second thing was, it was moving to a completely different venue that in one sense was the opposite of what the play was about. But that turned out to be incorrect, the move to Broadway exposed it to a much, much wider audience and gave accessibility to many more people. In retrospect, it was the absolute right decision. I mean literally, you're getting seven times the number of people to see it. It's the same cast. And it's the same lighting people. And it's the same designers. Same set. Everything basically is the same. The environment in the theater, in one sense, re-creates the Fourth Street environment. I mean, we have the artists' paintings all over the wall; we have some sort of shabbiness, nothing is really that fancy. And in the Shubert, we have our work hanging everywhere too. The Shubert in Boston is a more refined theater than the Nederlander in New York. But it works. The truth is that people come to see what's on the stage. I mean, at some point you make yourself nuts with trying to recreate the world outside inside everything else. We're playing in Los Angeles at the Albertson Theater, which is the finest theater in Los Angeles. And I have no regrets; I mean, it's the best theater, you have parking, you have creature comforts, and no matter how much you talk about Fourth Street, people want to be able to park.

So I mean, in some sense it's a state of mind, it's not a state of reality. You want to create a certain ambiance, but 99 percent of why you're going is to see what's on the stage, you're really not going to see the theater.

Rent is a portrayal of a very modern, liberal, accepting community.

There's one or two Republicans in it. I think it's non-judgmental, and it's not promotional. It's just, it's almost a camera on a society the way it is. I think that's the reason why it appeals to so many people. Because it's not advocating that lifestyle, it's just showing the lifestyle, and it's showing a battle against insurmountable odds, it's showing unity, it's showing love, things like that. It is showing, it is a multicultural society, it's a poor society, and it's ravaged by disease and everything else. I don't think it has a political message, as such. It's a message of love. Bill Clinton was there Saturday. I went with him, and...

Did he have a good time?

Yes, he had a wonderful time. It was Chelsea's seventeenth birthday, they came last Saturday, and he was there with Chelsea and with Hillary and with two or three of Chelsea's friends. And then they came upstairs to the stage, when we dropped the fire curtain, and they spent about forty minutes with the cast and everybody else. It was just delightful. He said it was very, very powerful, he loved it and he was impressed with the impact on young kids. And Chelsea loved it. And they came to New York specifically for Broadway. It was in all the papers.

Right. And combined with this cut-rate ticket thing, it's not theater as politics exactly, but a new attitude toward theater.

Well, in terms of opening it up to other people.

Exactly.

That's why we did it. And what's interesting is that, in New York for example, most of the crowd is a young crowd for those $20 seats. And the reason is, they will start forming maybe 20 hours before the next performance. In Boston, it's more of a mixed crowd. We're getting people 70 years old, getting retired people. It's a different kind of a crowd. In New York, sometimes you'll get older people, but that's maybe in the warmer weather. So we would never abandon [the twenty-dollar ticket]. We think it's great. It's also good for the audience because anyone who buys those tickets is very enthusiastic.

I wanted to know your opinion on this quote, which I read in The Boston Globe: "Rent symbolizes the '90s generation's simultaneous rejection of bourgeois society and, perhaps paradoxically, bourgeois society's acceptance of that rebellion."

What does that mean? [laughs] In a peculiar way, based on what I see in terms of the play and the audience, to some degree that has reality. I don't know if it's a rejection of bourgeois society, it's just, they can't attain it. You know, it's really an underclass kind of situation. But there is an acceptance of what you see on the stage, which basically reflects the East Village. There is an incredible acceptance among people that you would never believe are accepting, in terms of all the different issues that are raised and the different lifestyles. There were people who came to the Boston opening virtually from every aspect of Boston society: the chairman of banks, insurance companies, major, major corporations there-- basically, a conservative group of people. And I knew a lot of them. And they absolutely loved the show. Now, had you mentioned these issues prior to the show in a certain way, I'm sure they wouldn't have even gone. Maybe that's why they moved to Wellesley, or somewhere else. But once they were there, they knew exactly what they saw, these are smart people; half of them went to Harvard, and they loved it. And they did accept it for what it was. And because, I think part of it, it's not in your face. It is what it is, and you either accept it or you don't, but it is there, and it's part of society, it's part of life.