Nine hundred thirty thousand, one hundred eighty minutes.

That’s how you measure the total running time “Rent” will have played on Broadway when, as the producers said on Tuesday, it closes after its evening performance on June 1, making it the seventh-longest-running Broadway show in history.

But the length of its run is not nearly as significant as the kind of show it was. An East Village rock version of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème,” “Rent” brought a youthful energy  and young theatergoers  to Broadway, to a degree not seen since “Hair.” It also brought with it a real-life story so affecting that it would have overwhelmed the musical itself had the substance of the musical not been so intertwined with the story of its creation.

On the night of the final dress rehearsal at the New York Theater Workshop, the nonprofit theater in the East Village where the musical began, Jonathan Larson, the 35-year-old composer and librettist, died of an aortic aneurysm. He had been working for seven years on the musical, which includes portraits of his friends and the artists and addicts in his neighborhood, young people on the edge of poverty and in the shadow of AIDS, battling the coming wave of gentrification in the name of “La Vie Bohème.”

Image Rent, one of Broadways longest-running shows, opened at the Nederlander Theater in April 1996. Credit... Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

The show opened in February 1996, two and half weeks after Mr. Larson’s death. Critics were ecstatic, Broadway landlords were battling to play host to an uptown transfer, and everyone in town, including celebrities like Steven Spielberg and Anna Wintour, was scrambling to get tickets to a 150-seat Off Broadway theater in the East Village. Already a theater phenomenon, “Rent,” directed by Michael Greif, exploded onto Broadway two months later, on April 16, 1996, turning members of its mostly obscure cast into stars. It went on to win four Tony Awards, including best musical, and the Pulitzer Prize.