When \u201cRent,\u201d a rock musical version of Puccini\u2019s \u201cLa Boheme\u201d opened off-Broadway last February, Jonathan Larson garnered the kind of rave reviews that young, struggling composer-lyricists pray and dream for.<\/p>\n
Larson wasn\u2019t there to read the reviews–he died of an aortic aneurysm on the night of the final dress rehearsal at the age of 35. His opus depicts the life he knew–the disease- and drug-plagued but joyous Bohemia of New York\u2019s East Village, circa 1995. More than one reviewer dubbed the show a watershed event in the history of the American musical and declared Larson the posthumous savior of the form. The press celebrated a fabulous story, more dramatic even than when choreographer Gower Champion died hours before the opening of \u201c42nd Street\u201d 16 years before.<\/p>\n
A Pulitzer Prize soon followed, and a phenomenon was born, producing extreme curiosity and understandable skepticism among theater-goers who could not get a ticket to the tiny East Village theater where \u201cRent\u201d played a sold-out run. Monday night \u201cRent\u201d opened on Broadway, at the Nederlander Theatre, the most anticipated opening in several years. Anyone who hasn\u2019t seen it cannot help but ask: Would this musical be the red-hot ticket it is if Jonathan Larson had lived?<\/p>\n
What an incalculably strange and sad question that turns out to be. Muscular, chilling and energizing, \u201cRent\u201d is as full of death, and the prescience of dying, as any musical has ever been. The show focuses on a group of young people clinging fiercely together while living a difficult, exhilarating existence on the brink of poverty. And, as it turns out, Jonathan Larson is the main character in this wonderful but imperfect show. What would have been merely moving in \u201cRent\u201d is made almost unbearably bittersweet by the knowledge, apparent in almost every song, that Larson had grappled profoundly with the meaning of life and art in his final years. His death should be irrelevant to his achievement, and yet it is not.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m writing one great song before I go . . . one blaze of glory,\u201d sings Roger (Adam Pascal), an HIV-positive songwriter, in an act-one ballad. Soon he meets the similarly infected Mimi (the appealing and vulnerable Daphne Rubin-Vega), and the lovers come together to sing, \u201cThere is no future\/There is no past\/I live each moment as my last.\u201d \u201cHow do you measure a year?,\u201d asks a chorus line of poverty-ridden young people, in a simply beautiful number called \u201cSeason of Love.\u201d After suggesting the number of minutes and hours in which a year can be calculated, they suggest that you \u201cmeasure your life in love.\u201d<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Larson, director Michael Greif, and a fresh and talented cast give us a desolate, kinky and creative world, light-years away from the sanitized and monied fantasy worlds of \u201cBig\u201d and \u201cVictor\/Victoria,\u201d two of the season\u2019s other new musicals. In Larson\u2019s version of the Puccini opera, consumption has been replaced by the AIDS virus. Mimi, a diminutive and wild-haired S&M; dancer, cements her attraction to rocker Roger not by dropping her key in his apartment but by dropping a little bag of heroin.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Puccini\u2019s Marcello becomes Mark Cohen (Anthony Rapp), a pale young filmmaker from Scarsdale who looks a lot like the young Elvis Costello, and is as cool and emotionally post-modern. Mark\u2019s ex-love is Maureen, in Idina Menzel\u2019s energized performance, a big-voiced and sexually open performance artist who has taken up with Joanne<\/strong> (Fredi Walker), a law student. Colline becomes Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin), a computer whiz in love with Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), an exceptionally attractive and sweet transvestite who has AIDS.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n With one jokey exception, \u201cRent\u201d does not quote directly from \u201cLa Boheme,\u201d but its score nevertheless embraces the passion and tenderness of Puccini and straddles the world of rock as well, with its five excellent musicians pumping out the percolating, sometimes soaring melodies onstage. But while the show borrows the musical vocabulary and vocal stylings of rock, it is unlikely anyone would mistake it for actual rock music. It is a hybrid, and it tells its story in terms clearly defined by the musical form.<\/p>\n Its most direct antecedent is in fact the rock musical \u201cHair,\u201d which opened on Broadway on the same night, April 29, in 1968. Like the hippies immortalized in \u201cHair,\u201d the Bohemians of \u201cRent\u201d wear their youth, poverty and creativity like a cloak around them, shielding them from judgment by the enemy–anyone who has \u201csold out\u201d and has money. Very much modeled on the song \u201cSodomy\u201d from \u201cHair,\u201d the terrific act-one closer, \u201cLa Vie Boheme,\u201d is a list of things celebrated by this Generation X, including Uta and Buddha, Sontag and Sondheim, sodomy (\u201cIt\u2019s between God and me\u201d) and Lenny Bruce. This generation\u2019s Vietnam is the AIDS virus and the rampant materialism they see all around them.<\/p>\n In fact, one of the show\u2019s most unconvincing and simplistic plot points involves Mark\u2019s decision whether or not to \u201csell out\u201d by selling footage to an air-head TV show or to make his own film. But such issues–and even the superficiality of the characters, who are more spirited attitude than well-drawn people–are not the point. \u201cRent\u201d is a rousing anthem to living each day as it comes.<\/p>\n Under designer Paul Clay, the stage is used as an expansive overlapping living area for the artists, the onstage band and a chorus of family, friends, cops, the homeless and dispossessed, who merge with the action both onstage and above on two scaffolds. Greif proves an effective orchestrator of mass humanity, but at times he overextends or indulges the show\u2019s sentimentality, such as when he has an AIDS support group look down from a scaffold and comment on the meeting of Mimi and Roger below.<\/p>\n \u201cRent,\u201d the thing that most of its characters don\u2019t have the money to pay, is a blissfully overloaded hodgepodge of emotion and life and talent. \u201cHow do you figure a last year on Earth?,\u201d asks a plaintive chorus in the show\u2019s most beautiful number. \u201cFigure in love. Measure in love.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRent\u201d is a memorial service as a work of art, clearly and authentically created in love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When \u201cRent,\u201d a rock musical version of Puccini\u2019s \u201cLa Boheme\u201d opened off-Broadway last February, Jonathan Larson garnered the kind of rave reviews that young, struggling composer-lyricists pray and dream for. Larson wasn\u2019t there to read the reviews–he died of an aortic aneurysm on the night of the final […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[63,4],"class_list":["post-1310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-63","tag-rent"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-l8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1310"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1312,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions\/1312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}