 |
 |
  |
Rent
Composer-lyricist-librettist Jonathan Larson, who died tragically of an aortic aneurysm on the day of the show's first dress rehearsal, presents panoramically a year in the life of a dozen or so East Villagers. Faced with the squalor of a squatter's existence and the ravages of HIV, these incredible young heroes and heroines somehow build family and community with passion and style. Larson had an enormous amount on his mind and in his heart, and as a result Rent is imperfect, but only because it so brims and rocks with excess enthusiasms and energy. Rent features the best theatre score in years--maybe decades; it's one of the few mega-hit musicals to actually live up to its hype. A brand-new review of the current Broadway cast is below.
Ticket lottery: There are 34 $20 seats, located in the first two rows of the orchestra, available at every performance via a ticket lottery. Arrive two hours before curtain time to participate. Details are at the show's website; (click on "Tickets" and then on "Rush Tickets" for the rules).
Pictured: A scene from Rent (photo © Joan Marcus)
nytheatre.com review
Martin Denton · May 16, 2005
It's hard to believe that Rent is only nine years old. The world, on Broadway and everywhere else, seems far removed from that now innocent-seeming April night in 1996 when Rent—already a Pulitzer Prize winner; already legendary on account of the tragic death of its creator Jonathan Larson on the day of the show's first dress rehearsal—opened at the Nederlander Theatre. Yet Rent is still going strong and remains, on fifth viewing, as vibrant and thrilling as ever. Pieces of the story feel almost quaint: the gentrification of the East Village (which is anticipated by the character of Benny) has rendered many, though not all, of the referenced locations obsolete; advances in medical technology have made AIDS less of the death sentence than the HIV+ characters Roger, Mimi, Angel, and Collins believe it to be. But the play's social politics are, if anything, more resonant than ever: "How time flies / When compassion dies" sing a septet of homeless people near the end of the show, and ain't that the sad awful truth.
What's most eternal about the show, though, is its uplifting passionate spirit. Although half of its main characters are stricken with a disease that they expect to kill them at any moment, everyone in Rent is, or learns to be, jubilantly part of a community, soaking up life, love, and raw, pure experience with boundless zeal. Roger, the doomed rock singer/composer ("the pretty-boy front man / Who wasted opportunity," as he puts it) wonders how to go on when "reason says I should have died three years ago." Then he encounters Mimi, a nineteen year-old junkie living on-and-off on the streets, desperate but full of life despite the virus coursing through her veins. Backed by what feels like all of Alphabet City, she sings Roger Rent's anthem
There's only now
There's only here
Give in to love
Or live in fear
No other path
No other way
No day but today
And they fall in love.
Meanwhile, Larson's complicated but eminently comprehensible scenario spins out no fewer than three parallel story lines. Roger's ex-roommate Tom Collins, mugged on Christmas Eve, is befriended by the aptly named Angel Schunard, a drag queen with a heart bigger than New York City; by the end of the night, they've figured out that they're a couple, and Collins goes on to see Angel through his final battle with AIDS. Maureen, ex-girlfriend of Roger's current roommate Mark, is now involved with an activist lawyer named Joanne; their on-again, off-again romance generates significant fireworks and not a little of Rent's humor.
And then there's Mark himself, a wannabe filmmaker, a product of affluent suburban America trying to make art in Bohemia and searching, often vainly, for life experiences to feed it; he's clearly Larson's surrogate in the story and its engine, and his journey to finding himself defines Rent's arc and climaxes in its life-affirming ending, as he turns his camera on everyone in the theatre as the company reprises "No Day But Today" with inspirational fervor. It's Mark who extols "La Vie Boheme," a link not only to Larson's source material (the Puccini opera) but to the artistic spirit that underlies, energizes, and informs every minute of the musical, and wraps all of Rent's disparate themes into a (relatively) neat package: "To being an us—for once— / Instead of a them"; and later
To people living with, living with, living with
Not dying from disease
Let he among us without sin
Be the first to condemn
La Vie Boheme....The opposite of war isn't peace...
It's creation
La Vie Boheme
Seeing Rent again—and if you haven't seen it lately, you should—reminds us of the brilliance of its craftsmanship, even with its flaws—thankfully still uncorrected after all these years—still showing. Larson's score is spectacularly emotional and exciting, even when it feels convoluted or simple-minded: the great numbers—Roger's intro "One Song Glory," Mimi's "Light My Candle" and "Out Tonight," Angel & Collins's "I'll Cover You," Joanne & Maureen's duet "Take Me or Leave Me," Joanne & Mark's duet "The Tango Maureen," Roger & Mark's duet "What You Own," and of course the show-stopping "Seasons of Love"—are endlessly smart and sophisticated. Michael Greif's underrated direction and Marlies Yearby's hot choreography drive the show peerlessly, keeping the audience focused and engaged, and creating an astonishingly vivid, teeming urban community on the relatively modest Nederlander stage. (Credit for this is due, too, to set designer Paul Clay, costume designer Angela Wendt, and lighting designer Blake Burba.)
The producers—Jeffrey Seller, Kevin McCollum, Allan S. Gordon, and the New York Theatre Workshop—deserve our gratitude for keeping the show so fresh and potent. The present cast, which included a few understudies at the performance attended, is loaded with energy and attitude; standouts include Danielle Lee Greaves as Joanne, Karmine Alers as Mimi, Kelly Karbacz as Maureen, and Catrice Joseph, bringing the house down during her solo in "Seasons of Love." Matt Caplan is the best Mark I've ever seen, capturing with extraordinary intensity the "outsider/observer" quality that Larson has written into the role.
So—a long, enervating, world-changing decade later—Rent remains one of Broadway's most impressive treasures: certainly no show on the boards today is so passionate, or compassionate, as this one. The jolt of adrenalin that Larson gave to a moribund American musical theatre in 1996 has largely been supplanted by the cash-register hum of pre-sold multi-million-dollar movie adaptations ("Don't be afraid of ker-ching, ker-ching" is how Mark's nemesis Alexi Darling puts it in the show). But the good news is that Rent is still here, as vital as ever—and with a $95 top, even a bit of a bargain compared to its hundred-dollar competitors.
So when should you see it? No day like today.
This page updated Friday, July 4, 2008 12:22 PM
Copyright © 2008 The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. All rights reserved.
