Anwar Robinson’s singing career started with a dare. It was August 2004 when the New Jersey music teacher offered to drive some friends to the American Idol auditions in Washington D.C. That would be fine, they said, as long as Robinson agreed to audition with them.

As it turned out, Robinson not only survived the audition, but managed to make it to the finals three years ago in season four. And he did so without earning the wrath of the show’s chief curmudgeon, Simon Cowell.

“He was very respectful,” said Robinson, who appears in Rent this weekend at the Providence Performing Arts Center. “He wasn’t tough on me at all.”

Joining the cast of Rent back in October was a big step for Robinson, who earned national attention for his vocalizing on American Idol. He let the world know he could sing. But acting was a different story.

“I thought acting would be impossible,” said the 28-year-old singer, “because I’d just focused on music. But I got a call to come in and audition, and I got the part.”

Making it to the finals in Idol was no fluke, though. Robinson has been singing since he was a youngster in his Newark, N.J., church. He went on to study voice at the Westminster Choir College in Princeton. There he sang his share of classical music, but his teacher also let him explore his interest in gospel and jazz.

“I’m definitely grateful to him,” he said.

After college he got a couple of teaching jobs in New Jersey, where he taught general music and voice to middle schoolers. But he had to leave the second job because of his involvement with American Idol.

“I felt bad about that,” said Robinson on the phone from Boston. “But it was exciting for the school and for the community.”

Rent, which was last in town in 2003, is a somewhat hokey reworking of La Bohème, the Puccini opera about a group of 19th-century Bohemians living in the Paris slums. A century later, the late Jonathan Larson came along and traded Puccini’s arching arias for a hard-rock score, and a Parisian garret for a Lower East Side loft.

Its message is that love and living for today is enough to weather the worst that life has to dish out, a theme that has struck a chord with the musical’s many dedicated groupies. Rent won a Tony and a Pulitzer and was one of the first musicals to feature gay, bisexual and transgender characters. It brought controversial topics such as AIDS, gay sex and drug abuse to an otherwise conservative medium, speaking to a younger generation of theater goers the way Hair spoke to baby boomers. It’s sort of like Friends on crack.

Larson was a 29-year-old composer in 1989 when he teamed up with playwright Billy Aronson, who wanted to write a musical based on La Bohème. The two wrote some songs together before Larson took over the project and made it his own.

Larson focused on writing Rent in the early 1990s, while waiting on tables at the Moondance Diner. Over the course of seven years, he wrote hundreds of songs and made many changes to the plot.

After considerable reworking, the show made it to Broadway in 1996. Larson would not live to see the true success of his creation, however. He died of an aneurysm shortly after granting his first newspaper interview, when Rent was in previews.

Rent, which will close on Broadway in June, is the seventh longest running show in Broadway history.

In the show, Robinson plays the part of Tom Collins, a gay, HIV-positive college professor who falls for Angel, a drag queen drummer who performs on the streets of New York.

He is not the only Idol finalist in the show. Heinz Winckler, who plays the part of Roger Davis, was the winner of the first South African Idol in 2002 and the fourth place finalist in the 2003 inaugural World Idol competition, in which he competed against Kelly Clarkson.

Robinson said his character, Collins, is a nurturer, and in that sense is someone he has a hard time identifying with since he has had put that aspect of himself aside to concentrate on his career. After touring with American Idol finalists he formed his own record label and with some friends cut two disks, including his The Truth About Love. At this point, he is waiting to line up distribution.

“I’m very happy with the product and the process,” said Robinson.

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Photo by Peter Coombs