I am glad to have seen Rent at the Muny (finally). When it opened Off-Broadway in 1996, many compared it to a musical that opened twenty-five years earlier, Hair. As Hair was for and about the ’60’s generation, Rent was called the Hair for the X generation. (It should be time for a musical for the current generations.)
Rent also opened on the hundredth anniversary of the opening night of the Puccini opera that Rent is based on and was inspired by, La Boheme. Both stories are set in a poor section of their respective cities – Paris for La Boheme, New York for Rent – with cheap rentals inhabited by impoverished young artists and their friends, some of whom were not impoverished but chose to live as if they were. Rent anchors itself in the East Village apartment lacking heat and electricity of two young men, Mark a film-maker and Roger a musician and composer, with scenes moving out into the streets and bars of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. At the Muny, scenic designer Arnel Sancianco placed the apartment on the stage’s turntable so that it could quickly swing into place between external scenes defined by Paul Deziel’s video designs and the lighting designs of Heather Gilbert.
Seeing Rent again now after another quarter-century since I first saw it, I more clearly separate it from the comparisons I made with Hair. Both still define their generations. But I’m more aware of the differences between them. In Hair, the Vietnam War threatened the lives of its young men, a threat they countered with political action and by insisting on the right to live their lives, however shortened, by their own choices and not by the moral standards of their parents. In Rent, epidemics of drugs and of HIV/AIDS are the threats; parents barely exist. Group political action grapples with housing and economic insecurity. It is not the world of Hair. I am now seeing the characters in Rent in their individuality and not just as representatives of a generation.
The Muny production helps me here, thanks to the clear direction by Lili-Anne Brown and the character definitions by the cast. I see that Jonathan Larson’s book, music, and lyrics give the actors more to work with than I had been granting his development of his people. Lincoln Clauss’s Mark Cohen connects directly with the audience to deliver some narration, but his confident focus is on his camera and the epic he is creating from the scenes around him. Vincent Kempski suffers the frustrations of his apartment-mate Roger Davis as he tries to get beyond the opening notes of the song he hopes to leave as his memorial if or when AIDS finishes him. He and a downstairs neighbor have fallen in love; she, also, has AIDS. Mimi is a dancer described as both “exotic” and “erotic”; inventive choreographer Breon Arzell has given Ashley de la Rosa all that and more, an astounding dancer, fine singer, and convincing actor. Lindsay Heather Pearce plays Mark’s ex-girlfriend Maureen, a performance artist, now with her lesbian lover Joanne, a lawyer, played by Anastacia McCleskey; loving or fighting, they make a good pair. Another pair, both of them gay and with AIDS, were Devinre Adams’ Tom Collins, an adjunct professor of philosophy at New York University, and Adrian Villegas’s Angel, a cross-dressing street percussionist whose drag designs give costume designer Raquel Adorno and wig designer Ruebe D. Echoles fancy-free options. Angel’s dying scenes with Tom are touchingly done. Tre Frazier finds the good moments in the mostly bad moments of Benjamin Coffin III. He formerly lived in the apartment with Mark, Roger, Maureen, and Tom and had a relationship with Mimi. Now, having married well, he owns the building and, when they can’t pay the rent, locks them out. Such is life on the Lower East Side.
Rent includes a couple dozen more characters, played here by another seven actors.
After the intermission, as the second act begins, all the cast members line downstage to sing “Seasons of Love.” It’s still an earworm.
Jermaine Hill directing the orchestra and singers provides solid support with the sometimes tricky score.
John Shivers and David Patridge are the usual Muny sound designers. Kelsey Tippins is the Production Stage Manager.
I expect we may look forward to another Muny Rent in another five years or so.
—Bob Wilcox
Photo © Phillip Hamer Photography
Mark (Lincoln Clauss, right) films Roger (Vincent Kempski) in Rent.
