Movie Review |
They Still Call Her Mimi: Rentby George Sax |
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“That doesn’t remind us of ‘Musetta’s Waltz,’” someone jokes during a production number in the movie adaptation of Rent, as a musician (Adam Pascal) plays a few amplified guitar chords of that melody from Puccini’s opera, “La Boheme.” It’s a mildly self-deprecating, self-consciously amusing line.
Rent, which debuted in New York almost a decade ago, got its cachet and reputation from its acknowledged debt to the opera, and, much more importantly, from the tragic circumstances that surrounded its creation and premiere. Jonathan Larson, its composer-lyricist-writer, died at age thirty-five in January 1996 of an aortic aneurysm just after the last dress rehearsal. Rent was his first work to receive a regular, commercial New York production.
From its introduction to the public, then, Rent has been bathed in the sadly romanticizing glow of the tragic archetype of the artist dying young and unfulfilled. And this pop legend isn’t just a mass opportunity to luxuriate in might-have-beens. Larson’s gifts were real enough. Even the critical White Queen of queens, New York magazine’s John Simon, who increasingly disliked the show the more he considered it, grudgingly conceded this point.
Larson, a protégé of Stephen Sondheim, has been portrayed as a theatrical insurgent who wanted to renovate the Broadway musical and give it a new claim to existence. At a decade’s remove from its premiere, its impact on musical theatre seems no more than negligible. Larson’s multi-modal score, with its wide range of pop references, is mostly bright, appealing, intermittently clever, and occasionally musically and dramatically incisive. But it’s not innovative and didn’t point to a new direction. (Mixing popular styles and genres dates back at least to Jerome Kern’s Showboat in the 1920s.)
Rent doesn’t really offer any new synthesis or approach. From opera Larson borrowed his use of recitative to maintain musical flow and feeling within some scenes, but Sondheim had done something at least similar. And as several of his collaborators noted as the show was being workshopped, Larson was, at best, an inexperienced book and lyric writer. The show’s story and dialogue are too often banal, as are the lyrics.
Rent, of course, moved La Boheme from Paris to New York’s East Village in 1989, and substituted a group of Alphabet City bohos—struggling artists and other socially marginal personnel—for the opera’s French demimonde characters. Not that Larson hewed closely to the story of either the opera or the 1849 play by Henri Murger on which it was based.
Roger (Pascal) is a former band front man who’s HIV-positive and trying to write one last great song to leave behind him. His pal Mark (Anthony Rapp), a filmmaker, shares their squatters’ loft, which is owned by a former roommate who went straight, marrying for money, and who threatens to evict them. Mimi (Rosario Dawson), Puccini’s same-named tubercular seamstress, is now a drug-addicted pole dancer in an S&M club.
The prototypes for Roger and Mark in Murger’s play were, if not slumming, at least able to eventually escape from bohemia into respectable financial stability. Larson seems to have taken his characters and milieu more earnestly and politically, but it’s hard to say the results are more serious. Rent is often vibrant and winning, but it’s also kind of bubble-headed.
It’s Larson’s large-spirited, generous sensibility that renders Rent both questionably sentimental and engaging. It’s not that he was without resources of wit and musical invention, but that he didn’t turn them into any kind of crackling or pungent social observation, despite a few perfunctory gestures. And his saved-by-the-bell ending isn’t just counter-Puccini, it’s virtually Edwardian-retro in its heartstring-tugging melodramatics. Director Chris Columbus, a man who has never exhibited a real dark side on screen, hasn’t modulated Larson’s more lightheaded tendencies.
But Rent’s heartfelt enthusiasms can be a little hard to fight, particularly during some of its abundant musical performances. Much of the cast, including Rapp and Pascal, is from the original production and it’s difficult to imagine a more vivacious and gifted crew. One small revelation for many will be Buffalo-born Jesse L. Martin’s (TV’s “Law and Order”) appearance as Collins, a philosophy grad student in love with a street-drumming drag queen (Wilson Jermaine Heredia). Martin sings and dances in an accomplished, impressively varied fashion. He lends the show a warmly wry, emotionally substantial presence.
Rent succeeds in its decidedly uneven way on a much more conventional plane than its early advocates claimed for it. Larson was no Sondheim—at least on the evidence of this show—but he had a real talent that he didn’t live to extend and develop.
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