It was the year's Cinderella story -- with a tragic turn: Rent, an off-off-Broadway rock musical with no "stars" and a virtually unknown author, moves to Broadway, wins the Pulitzer, garners rave reviews, standing o's and more awards, and does so only weeks after said composer/lyricist dies of a brain aneurysm at age 35. Little wonder Rent is considered this year's musical phenomenon, a little engine that not only could but electrified as it hurtled along. Comparisons have been made to Hair, not just because both shows use rock and roll to shake up the theater establishment, but because both deal with young people finding their place in an insular community that, at first, seems alien to a middle-class audience's concept of "normal" Americans.
Rent's assemblage are the artsy, Avenue B poor: teen & twenty-something squatters who refuse to pay back rent on their unheated, unlivable loft. Benny, the landlord, who plans to turn the space into a "Cyber Arts" studio, is also the ex-boyfriend of Mimi, an HIV+ junkie. Hoping for a light during a power outage, Mimi wanders into the loft and meets Rodolfo - er, Roger, and it's lust at first sight. At least for her; it takes Roger several more scenes to come around and out of his self-pitying funk. Which is the major problem with Rent; after Roger and Mimi's irresistible duet, "Light My Candle," the piece goes short on action and long on characters bemoaning their troubles and prickly relationships.
Just as in Hair, painting an overall picture of a group dynamic becomes more important than giving the story focus and forward drive. Like too many current shows, Rent, with its heavy amplification and me-me-me characters keeps hammering at us (at least in the first act) instead of letting us meet it halfway. Act two finds more time to play with the couplings, between Joanne and performance artist Maureen, between Tom and the transvestite drummer he meets after getting mugged. We also see the white-bread narrator, a filmmaker, confront his inability to connect and decide whether to take a commercial TV job. Ultimately, the piece gets back to the "La Boheme" story, though with a surprisingly hopeful (if ridiculously scripted) twist. Still, Roger's anguished, rock `n' roll bellow of "Mimi!" over her deathbed raises the goosebumps, and no question Rent has some of the most exciting music on Broadway. Not just the ruminative ballad "Seasons Of Love" and the pumped-up "La Vie Boheme," but numbers that convey the ebb and flow of spoken dialogue in a way much more interesting (and melodic) than operatic recitative.
When the compact disc comes out, with all the lyrics decipherable and without the pedestrian, Chorus Line-style, horizontal staging, Rent will surely sound like the answer to a theater music-lover's prayer. On stage, however, one wouldn't mind if Rent had a little more old-fashioned book craft to go with its new-minted creativity. In future works, Jonathan Larson might have been able to merge both disciplines, had he but world enough...and time.
