When Roger, a character in the hit musical Rent, sings "One song/Glory/One song/Before I go/Glory/One song to leave behind . . ./Find/Glory/In a song that rings true/Truth like a blazing fire/An eternal flame," his is a passionate urgency. He is a punk rocker who has AIDS, and he wants to write one good song before he dies. Rent's young composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson was looking for glory, too. Driven by a lifelong passion for American musical theater, he wanted to suffuse it with the energy of contemporary storytelling and popular music. In doing so, he hoped to change it so that it might ring true for more diverse--and younger--audiences. "Those are not our people uptown; those are not our stories uptown; that's not our music," Larson once told a friend, according to Paula Span in the Washington Post. "He...