RENT - Musical
There's a scene in the new musical "RENT" that may be the quintessential
romantic moment of the '90s. Roger, a struggling rock musician, and Mimi, a
junkie who's a dancer at an S/M club, are having a lovers' quarrel when their
beepers go off and each takes out a bottle of pills. It's the signal for an "AZT
break," and suddenly they realize that they're both HIV-positive. Clinch. Love
duet. If you don't think this is romantic, consider that Jonathan Larson's
sensational musical is inspired by Puccini's opera "La Boheme," in which the
lovers Mimi and Rodolfo are tragically separated by her death from tuberculosis.
Different age, different plague. Larson has updated Puccini's end-of-19th-century
Left Bank bohemians to end-of-20th-century struggling artists in New York's East
Village. His rousing, moving, scathingly funny show, performed by a cast of
youthful unknowns with explosive talent and staggering energy, has brought a
shocking jolt of creative juice to Broadway. A far greater shock was the sudden
death of 35-year-old Larson from an aortic aneurysm just before his show opened.
His death just before the breakthrough success is the stuff of both tragedy and
tabloids. Such is our culture. Now Larson's work, along with "Bring in 'Da Noise,
Bring in 'Da Funk," the tap-dance musical starring the marvelous young dancer
Savion Glover, is mounting a commando assault on Broadway from the
downtown redoubts of off-Broadway. Both are now encamped amid the revivals
("The King and I") and movie adaptations ("Big") that have made Broadway such
a creatively fallow field in recent seasons. And both are oriented to an audience
younger than Broadway usually attracts. If both, or either, settle in for a
successful run, the door may open for new talent to reinvigorate the once
dominant American musical theater. "RENT" so far has the sweet smell of
success, marked no only by it's $6 million advance sale (solid, but no guarantee)
but also by the swarm of celebrities who have clamored for tickets: Michelle
Pfeifer, Sylvester Stallone, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Ralph
Fiennes name your own biggie. Last week, on opening night, 21 TV crews,
many from overseas, swarmed the Nederlander Theatre to shoot the 15 youthful
cast members in euphoric shock under salvos of cheers. Supermogul David
Geffen of the new DreamWorks team paid just under a million dollars to record
the original-cast album. Pop artitsts who've expressed interest in recording songs
from the 33-number score include Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton and Boyz II
Men. A bidding scrimmage has started for the movie rights among such
Hollywood heavies as Warner Brothers, Danny DeVito's Jersey Films, Fox 2000
and Columbia. The asking price is $3 million, but bonuses for length of run, the
Pulitzer Prize (which "RENT" has already won), various Tony and critics' awards
could jack the price up to $3.75 million. Despite these stupefying numbers, the
young producers, Jeffrey Seller, 31, and Kevin McCollum, 34, and their
associate, moneyman Allan S. Gordon, know that they're not home free. "There's
no such thing in New York," says Seller. "Our company has mostly done tours. If
you sell 8,000 seats a week in Cleveland, you did a great job. Never having done
a Broadway show, the idea that you have to sell 450,000 seats a year is daunting."
Major Broadway players like the Shubert Organization and Jujamcyn Theaters,
which lost out to the Nederlander in the feverish grab for "RENT," would love to
be daunted like these Broadway tyros. Rocco Landesman, Jujamcyn's president,
says he's "crushed" at not getting "RENT." He predicts the show will be a
"crossover success; it will attract an ethnically diverse audience, people who are
not normally theatergoers." "RENT" has a $67.50 top ticket price, but the
producers have reserved the first two rows at $20 and are tagging mezzanine seats
at a "bargain" $30. "'RENT' has a lot riding on its shoulders," says producer Jim
Freydberg, whose "Big" has just opened. "I desperately hope it works. If it's
successful, we're going to get more daring shows on Broadway. If it's not, we're
going to get more revivals." This is interesting, coming from a competitior whose
own show, based on the popular Tom Hanks movie about a 13-year-old boy who
wakes up on day in the body of a 30-year-old man, could be said to represent the
less daring sector of Broadway. "If I really wanted to make money I'd go to Wall
Street and invent money," says Seller. "I came to Broadway because I was excited
by the question 'Can you challenge the mainstream? Can you reinvent the
mainstream from inside the mainstream?'" Says McCollum: "It would be
disingenuous to say we don't hope to make money with 'RENT.' But I'm here
because I love the living theater." As Gordon puts it, "We're trying to reinvent
how you spend money on Broadway. We have no limos. They don't want us at
any glitzy restaurants." The weird thing is that when these hyped-up, fresh-faced
guys say these things, you find yourself believing them. "RENT" completes a
fortuitous trilogy begun by "Hair" in 1967 and continued by "A Chorus Line" in
1975. These breakthrough musicals deal with "marginal" Americans - '60s flower
children, the blue-collar gypsy dancers of Broadway, and now in "RENT" the
young people who follow a dream of art in a cold time for spirit and body.
Larson, who was a denizen of New York's down under, evokes in swirling detail
the downtown scene that is a paradoxical mix of wasteland and community. The
homeless, the addicts and alkies move like oracular nomads among the "artistes"
(as a homeless woman scornfully calls them), who don't know where their next
rent check is coming from, or their next inspiration for a song or a picture, or the
next lethal raid by the specter of AIDS. Yet "RENT" is a thrilling, positive show.
In a rich stream of memorable songs, Larson makes true theater music from the
eclectic energies of today's pop-rock, gospel, reggae, salsa, even a tango. The
"RENT" story began in the summer of 1992, when Larson, riding his bike down
Fourth Street in the East Village, passed the New York Theatre Workshop, which
was in a mess with a major renovation. "He stuck his head in the door," says
James Nicola, the artistic director of NYTW. "He looked in and thought, 'This is
perfect.'" What was perfect was the extraordinary NYTW stage, 40 feet wide and
30 feet deep in a house that had 150 seats. It's actually a larger stage than the
Nederlander's. "Jonathan always wanted to walk a fine line between being the
iconoclast and the person that descends from the tradition and reinvents it," says
Nicola. "Our space brought together all these things. It was a great physical
expression of what he wanted." The next day Larson cycled back and dropped off
a tape of songs he had written for "RENT," all sung by him. "I listened to a
couple of songs and immediately knew this was a rare and gifted songwriter,"
says Nicola. The four-year process of creating "RENT" had begun. A director,
Michael Greif, was brought in, a crucial step in the shaping of what was more of
a collage than a play. "I was anxious to neutralize Jonathan's emotionalism and
bring in some irony," says Greif, a 36 year-old who is now the artistic director of
the La Jolla Playhouse in California. "Jonathan was such a wet guy emotionally,"
says Greif with a laugh. "He was exuberant, childish in all the good and bad
ways. He had this enormous capacity for joy. He'd write a song and say 'I love it!'
And I'd say, 'Guess what? I don't.'" The process continued, helped by a Richard
Rogers Award of $50,000 (for which Stephen Sondheim, Larson's idol and
inspiration, was a judge). At a workshop production seen by Broadway producers,
Seller and McCollum were blown away by what they saw and heard. It was a
work that took Larson's "wet" emotionalism and turned it into a fountain of
unchecked melody and rhythm. Although he called "RENT" a rock opera, it has a
much wider range than rock, and the score is not a series of discrete bursts of
music. From the title number, a fierce outcry is a world where "Strangers,
landlords, lovers/Your own bloodcells betray," the music sweeps Larson's
characters - the principals and a wonderful ensemble of shifting figures - into a
living tapestry of hope, loss, striving, death and a climactic resurrection. Larson
takes Puccini's young bohemians and refashions them into Roger (Adam Pascal),
a pretty-boy rocker desperate to write one great song before AIDS kills him;
Mimi (Daphne Rubin-Vega), a dancer doomed by drugs; Maureen, a performance
artist (Idina Menzel), and her lesbian lover Joanne (Fredi Walker); Angel (Wilson
Jermaine Heredia), a drag queen also doomed by AIDS, and his lover Tom (Jesse
L. Martin), a computer genius who fears the cyberfuture; Ben (Taye Diggs), the
landlord in a world where lords shouldn't land; and Mark (Anthony Rapp), a
nerdy video artist (and Larson's surrogate) who narrates all the interweaving
stories to the audience. In songs like Angel and Tom's "I'll Cover You," and Mimi
and Roger's "Without You," Larson exalts love as the force that binds his
characters into an extended family who care for each other with all the many
varieties of love, from sex to friendship to compassion. "Take Me or Leave Me"
is a fiery and funny duet for Maureen and Joanne, each insisting on her fierce
individuality. The onstage band led by Tim Weill drives not only the irresistibly
singable score but the explosively witty choreography of Marlies Yearby, who
makes every move a flesh-riff of the life force itself. Like all the best popular art,
"RENT" dares you to feel sentimental, showing how sentimentality can be turned
into an exultant sweetness without which life is a grim mechanism. Puccini had
his Mimi die. Larson sends his Mimi to the point of extinction and brings her
back. There are deaths in "RENT," but Larson needed to balance that with a
rebirth. His own death before he could really see how well he had done in an
unbearable irony. He left us singing. "RENT" is his song.
. RENT - Musical
There's a scene in the new musical " ;RENT& quot; that may be the quintessential
romantic. Rodolfo are tragically separated by her death from tuberculosis.
Different age, different plague. Larson has updated Puccini's end-of-19th-century
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