The movie version of the smash Broadway show "Rent" may not have made "Dreamgirls" or "Hairspray" level box office grosses, but it did something even better in my opinion: it cast much of the original cast from the stage production including the amazingly talented Anthony Rapp who I met last week at the Ribbon of Hope Celebration.

"I call it like a showbiz miracle. Like, it never happens," Anthony said. "Occassionally maybe one person from an original cast. But six of us? It was amazing. A gift."

The 36-year-old actor returned to Broadway for a several months this summer and fall to reprise his signature role of Mark Cohen in the still-running show that remains a huge part of his life and career.

"I wrote a book that came out last year and I'm working on a one-man show adaptation of it called "Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Musical 'Rent,'" Mark said. "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. The complicated colliding of all that."

Although "Rent" provided Anthony with a break-out part, he has been working professionally since the age of nine. He played Charlie Brown in the Broadway revival of "You're A Good Man Charlie Brown" and other theater credits include the original Broadway production of "Six Degrees of Separation" (he also appeared in the film version), "An American Family" as well as productions of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and "Little Shop of Horrors."

He's also worked steadily in other mediums. On television, Anthony had a recurring role on NBC's "Kidnapped," and guested on such series as "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and "The X Files." In addition to "Rent" and "Six Degrees," movie credits include "Winter Passing," "Open House," "A Beautiful Mind," "Road Trip," "School Ties," "Dazed and Confused" "Adventures In Babysitting" and "Twister."

But "Rent" still draws him and Anthony embraced being something of a spokesman for the musical which has been running on Broadway for more than a decade. Inspired by and 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 got to go to South Africa this year to work on a production of "Rent" there, I directed it, and the AIDS and HIV world there is so different there than it is here," Anthony said. "I'm seeing both sides of things. There, they have so little access to many of these drugs that are helping so many people here. At the same time, here, the drugs aren't always helping everyone in the same way. So, we've made enormous strides, but it certainly is not over...The flip side of the [drug] cocktails is that people are probably taking bigger risks than they used to because they think you take the cocktails and everything's fine. My musical director in South Africa is HIV positive and he's very healthy but it's a big deal in his life. He has to take those cocktails, it's not a small thing."

"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. 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."