– Musical Essay, Research Paper
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 believ
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.