Happy Birthday to Anthony Rapp!

Anthony Rapp, the gifted (and out!) actor whose signature role is that of Mark Cohen in Rent, turns 38 years old today.

I’m so sorry I missed the chance to see Anthony perform in Rent live when it had a short run at the Pantages Theater in earlier in the year but, thank God, he and most of the original cast got to star in the movie version a few years back. They also reunited for some final live shows last year before the show finally ended its long Broadway run and that too was released as a film.

Anthony, who has a long list of television and film credits, is currently on a national tour of the show and clearly embraces his role as the unofficial spokesman for Rent. Three years ago, he released the memoir Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent which he also adapted into a one-man show.

“It’s about being in the show, my mom passed away while I was in the show and [playwright] Jonathan Larson who wrote the show passed away so it’s about the amazing fulfillment of being a part of that experience at the same time as these really difficult thing happened,” Anthony said when we spoke in late 2007. “The complicated colliding of all that.”

Partially based on Giacomo Puccini’s opera La bohème, Rent is about impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York’s Alphabet City in the thriving days of the Bohemian East Village, under the shadow of AIDS.

That shadow still exists, even after all these years.

“I’ve been in the business since I was a kid in the early 80s and I witnessed colleagues of mine even then succumbing to AIDS,” Anthony said. “We didn’t even know what it was. My mom was a nurse and she worked in the prison system so we was a part of that front line. So, it’s been a part of my world and awareness for a very long time.”