REVIEW: AIDS-era musical RENT holds up because it’s about the people
It was 20 years ago that RENT premiered on Broadway. Perhaps a couple of decades have blunted the musical’s ability to shock us – but it still is able to pack a considerable musical and emotional wallop. For a while, the musical was the longest running in Broadway history – 12 years. It won a Pulitzer, a fist full of Tonys and has by all accounts been in production somewhere ever since.
This 20th anniversary production, currently playing until Sept. 8 at the Jubilee Auditorium from Broadway Across Canada, may have little to add to the original but it’s certainly up to the high standards set by ravishing music and supported by strong performances.
The music, book and lyrics, all written by Jonathan Larson, are loosely based on Puccini’s La Boheme and share the great operatic composer’s libretto: a tale of poverty stricken bohemians living in the big city. Puccini romanticized his marginal band of Parisian artists. Larson stripped off the veneer of frayed glamour and found his people where they lived – on the mean streets of Lower Manhattan’s East Village. Many of his characters are queer or people of colour struggling through (and not always successfully) the AIDS crisis. Rent is defiantly about explicit and ambivalent sex, drugs and the intimate lives of LGBTQ people. The setting is a flophouse.
This musical was about more than that. Amidst the poverty and homelessness there is a longing for something better – love, hope and friendship. Of all the productions I’ve seen over the years, this one is almost relentless in its exuberance in realizing in dramatic and musical terms, the dreams of its characters.
Rent chronicles the passage of one year – as it observes in its big hit, Seasons of Love, “Five Hundred 25 thousand 600 minutes – how do you measure, measure a year?”
From this production, it seems that success has not particularly brought artistic fatigue to Rent. The young cast brings commitment and considerable talent – both as singers and actors. There is not a weak voice or shaky performance in the show. Larson’s pounding rock-based music is demanding, and the mighty five-piece orchestra is smokin’. The energy does not fade right through to the touching and rather unexpected ending.
The plot has something to do with staging a protest and selling out to a conglomerate, but the musical, like the operatic original, swirls about the people. Larson’s plot has the seemingly doomed exotic dancer Mimi (Aiyana Smash) ravaged and addicted, coming into the disconsolate (and recovering addict himself) Roger’s (Coleman Cummings) room looking for someone to light her candle. That’s not a metaphor – she actually wants her candle re-lit. His roomie Mark (Cody Jenkins) is a rich Jewish kid running from his parents and unwilling to participate – watching life through the lens of his 16mm movie camera. They live with Tom (Shafiq Hicks), an amiable dude who one day just wandered into Roger’s room. Tom meets Angel (Joshua Tavares), a spirited pixie of a creature, and begins a transforming, trans-sexual relationship. The tender ballad they sing to each other, I’ll Cover You, is one of the best moments in the show.
If the times have not dulled the impact of the characters or the situations, they have also been kind to Larson’s music and lyrics. The familiar songs, in sumptuous arrangements, just keep coming: One Song Glory, Tango: Maureen, Another Day, the comic love-hate duet Take Me Or Leave Me, the protracted celebration of the vibrant life housed in the slum La Vie Boheme, and the rousing finale Your Eyes remain current and universal.
Part tribal rite, part tender love story and part testament to how love and hope can blossom in the most unforgiving and hostile environment, after two decades Rent remains a solid Broadway classic.
(Rush seats are available one hour prior to each performance for $25.00.)
Photos by Amy Boyle
