Rent

Saturday, 14 March 2009

I confess, while I liked certain portions of this musical and I know that it is well-lauded and has won a cache of awards... maybe I'm viewing it from a 2009 sensibility - which would make Jonathan Larsen's posthumous Broadway triumph almost a generation removed from it's zeitgeist era of late 1980's Lower East Side New York.

One of the first original American rock operas to reinvent the genre of musical theatre, Rent is loud, smart, rude and defiant - very much like it's youth quake MTV inducted creators and cast, and it's energy, confrontational subject matter and sometimes comedic characters and scenarios mark it as a worthy recipient of not just a Tony Award for best musical, but also the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1996.

This production was staged at WAAPA's Roundhouse Theatre, the audience very much up close and personal, right into the trials and tribulations of this AIDS and HIV-positive soap, dealing with hook-ups, AZT programs, relationship and commitment issues, debauchery and death.

Mitch Roberts played the central character of Mark, who through his candid camera and pontification introduces us to his merry band of mayflies, "No day but today!"

He was spot-on with his accent and it never wavered even in song, a difficult thing to pull off for the long period of time a majority of characters were on stage for. His lone status as being the only one not afflicted gravitated the audience somewhat; he was the viewer, trying to empathize with his creative friends, but ultimately selling out to escape the poverty and despair.

There seemed to be some sound issues on the night I went, a number of the singers were overpowered by the small but loud band, and pertinent lyrics and dialogue were lost to the newbies yet to class themselves as "Rent-heads".

Francine Cain as sexy and scandalous Maureen rocked the house in her opening number and played cute as both irresistible and pain-in-the-ass, the most memorable of ex-girlfriends.

Other romances swirled and slipped away but love seemed to still breathe as Mimi reclaimed enough in the closing scenes to not die in the arms of tortured Roger.

Does Rent now look a little self-indulgent in today's pared back world, where New York though not necessarily sombre is now far more aware of where it and America's excesses have taken it? Maybe. I would say more that the very contemporary vein that brought it acclaim over a decade ago might now be what marks it a epochal piece of the post Reaganite years.