“Rent” Stars Reunite for World AIDS Day Benefit Concerts
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Las Olas Oceanside Park, Fort Lauderdale
Monday, December 1, 2025
CAN Community Event Center, Tampa
By Savannah Whaley
The year was 1991. Los Angeles Lakers superstar Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive and abruptly retired. Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury died of AIDS-related bronchial pneumonia. And in Sarasota, community volunteer Susan Terry helped establish one of the first comprehensive care clinics dedicated to treating those with HIV.
Five years later, the rock musical Rent opened on Broadway after transferring from the off-Broadway run of which The New York Times reported that this updated version of Puccini’s La bohème featuring “characters living in the shadow of AIDS” was “…blessed with voices of remarkable flexibility and strength. The unflaggingly focused Mr. Rapp gives the show its energetic motor; the golden-voiced Mr. Pascal its meditative soul.”
Thirty years later, Adam Pascal who portrayed Roger and Anthony Rapp who originated the role of Mark in that Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award®-winning cultural landmark will reunite for World Aids Day Concerts in Fort Lauderdale and Tampa that will benefit the Susan Terry Foundation and the organization that grew out of her passionate commitment: CAN Community Health.
Borrowing a song title from Rent’s score, the concert is themed “No Day But Today” and is produced by CAN in partnership with HarmonyWaves and Gray Box Theatre.
While HIV is no longer the death sentence it was in 1991, recent political attacks on LGBTQA+ rights and health equity give lyrics from the pair’s poignant Rent duet “You Are What You Own,” renewed relevance: “You’re living in America, where it’s like the Twilight Zone.”
The two Broadway leading men promise to bring their friendship and history together for an unforgettable and celebratory night of music in honor of lives affected by HIV and AIDS and inspire the continued fight toward ending the epidemic. In addition to a few songs from Rent, the duo will perform songs from various projects throughout their careers and music that has influenced their lives.
Acting professionally since he was nine years old, Rapp performed in Rent both off-Broadway and Broadway as well as in Chicago and London. In fact, he literally wrote the book on the musical penning Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent. In addition to his stage appearances in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, If/Then and his original show, Without You, Rapp boldly went where no man had gone before as the first gay character in the Star Trek universe as Paul Stamets in Star Trek: Discovery.
As Rapp told NBC News in 2017, “I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of Star Trek TV’s first gay couple. I can’t say how much that means to me personally as a fan of the series and as a member of the LGBT community. I’m proud of the fact that none of that really matters in the show.”
Pascal, whose other leading roles on Broadway include Aida, Memphis, Something Rotten! and Disaster!, is making a return to South Florida where he was last seen starring in the tour of Pretty Woman after entertaining audiences in a 2017 tour of Something Rotten! which prompted Florida Theater On Stage to report, “With matinee idol good looks, Pascal selflessly lampoons the preening Shakespeare…It’s a masterful hoot of acting and writing.”
The two friends recently teamed up last year in “Adam Pascal & Anthony Rapp: Celebrating Friendship & History,” at Manhattan’s fabled cabaret Feinstein’s/54 Below.
Speaking to the show business trade paper Variety at that time, Pascal said “I would venture to say there’s no male duo from Broadway more recognizable than he and I — other than Nathan [Lane] and Matthew [Broderick of The Producers]. A number of years ago, I approached Anthony and said, ‘We should do some concerts together. We’ll draw more people if it’s both of us.’ We started doing stuff together, and lo and behold, we drew more people.”
They also draw critical acclaim.
Of a 2016 engagement they performed at the same venue, the New York Times wrote, “Vocally Mr. Pascal’s style, with its oratorical flourishes and art-rock grandiosity, evokes early David Bowie and Queen, while Mr. Rapp’s steady, impassioned delivery has unadorned folk-rock simplicity and sincerity.”
Fans can now catch them in two concerts that help kick off the Susan Terry Foundation, which CAN established in July 2025.
“We launched a foundation specifically to focus on the fight for HIV because, even though CAN has a broader mission now, we still felt like there was a need for that identity and to continue Susan’s mission,” said CAN Community Health Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Kal Gajraj.
Terry died in 2009 and the foundation that bears her name funds CAN’s patients’ assistance program that empowers CAN to never turn anyone away that lacks insurance. The fund has already made grants for a PrEP access program in Tampa and the restoration of a storm-damaged AIDS memorial at the Church of the Trinity in Sarasota.
“Originally, it was Susan Terry who founded CAN in Sarasota as the Comprehensive Care Center,” Gajraj explained. “Susan wanted to help patients who were diagnosed with AIDS to get their treatment and medication in a stigma-free zone. The first location was actually in an abandoned laundromat where patients would come and Susan would treat them. She and Dr. Jeffrey Stall, our first medical director, joined together to issue the medication and treatment and to give patients a welcoming home.”
While there have been medical advances in the past 35 years, HIV has not been eradicated. Approximately 1.2 million people in the United States are living with HIV including an estimated 13% who are unaware of their status. Florida ranks third in the U.S. in the rate of newly diagnosed HIV cases and is home to 120,000 people living with HIV.
This raises the question: Is the time ripe for a Rent revival? In speaking to Variety, Rapp said, “It’s a period piece. The face of AIDS and HIV has changed tremendously. So in that sense, it’s a time capsule of those moments before protease inhibitors or PrEP. At the same time, we’re still talking about some of these things: inequities, health care.…So, if there is a revival, I don’t think it should just be a carbon copy.”
There are no carbon copies of talents such as Rapp and Pascal. The World AIDS Day concerts offer the rare opportunity to see them together and recalls the lyrics from “Seasons of Love,” perhaps the most popular song from Rent: “It’s time now to sing out, though the story never ends.”
