A Downtown 'La Boheme'

Newsweek
February 26, 1996
By Jack Kroll

During rehearsals of his musical "Rent," composer-writer-lyricist Jonathan Larson was told by his excited producers, "Jonathan, you're the new voice." Larson smiled: "Yeah? That's good." Hours after the dress rehearsal on January 24, Larson, 35, was found dead of an aortic aneurysm in his Greenwich Village apartment. After the show's opening last week at the off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop, the new voice, now stilled, was greeted with the most feverishly enthusiastic reviews for any new American musical in many years. With tragic irony, Larson's death echoed the spirit of "La Boheme," the Puccini opera about penniless young artists which was the basis of "Rent." Where Puccini's heroine Mimi died, Larson has his Mimi live. Instead, he perished.

There is death in "Rent"--death from AIDS, the modern plague that has supplanted the tuberculosis that killed Puccini's Mimi. But by "resurrecting" Mimi, Larson emphasizes the irrepressible surge of life. The first impact of "Rent" is the astonishing human violence of its vital spirit, embodied by the youthful multicultural cat who perform with ecstasy of commitment that is irresistible. In a way they are playing themselves: Puccini's 19th-century Left Bank bohemians have become late-20th-century struggling artists in New York's Alphabet City in the East Village.

"Rent" focuses on three couples. Roger (Adam Pascal), a musician desperate to write one great song before he succumbs to the plague, falls for Mimi (Daphne Rubin-Vega), a dancer at an S&M club who is doomed by drugs and HIV. Another HIV victim, the drag queen Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), loves Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin), a computer teacher dubious about the cyberworld of virtual reality. Performance artist Maureen (Idina Menzel) has a stormy relationship with her lesbian lover Joanne (Fredi Walker). Maureen's ex-lover Mark (Anthony Rapp) is a would-be filmmaker who serves as spokesman to the audience. Ben (Taye Diggs) is the landlord who threatens to evict the artists from their loft. Any whiff of artists' superiority is dispelled by the homeless, who scorn the young people as "bleeding hearts."

Did you just mutter that you don't give a damn about these people? You do, as Larson presents them in their juicy, confused, sexy, sex-scared, hopeless, hopeful humanity. His songs (there are 33 numbers) seem to leap straight from his characters' hearts. The title number is a fierce anthem of rebellion in a world where "strangers, landlords, lovers/Your own blood cells betray." Larson writes several kinds of love songs: Roger and Mimi's yearning "Without You," Angel's and Collins's compassionate "I'll Cover You," a blazing, witty duet for Maureen and Joanne, "Take Me or Leave Me." Director Michael Greif has a fine feel for the dynamic theatricality of Larson's music: a song will start as a solo, become a duet and ignite into a choral outpouring driven by a great onstage band led by Tim Weil, reinforced by the funky, un-Broadway choreography of Marlies Yearby.

Crazy face: Larson's score is the post-Sondheim musical's most successful attempt yet to fuse the eclectic energies of contemporary pop music the needs of the theater. His versions of gospel, rock, reggae, even a tango, add up to a brilliant portrait of the crazy cubistic face of today's pop. "Rent" completes a marvelously fortuitous trilogy that started with "Hair" and went on to "A Chorus Line." All these breakthrough musicals deal with "marginal" Americans: the flower children of the '60s, the gypsy dancers who sweat and smile on Broadway, and now the young people who follow the often quixotic dream of art in a chilling time for the soul and body. These shows make their characters emblems of a striving that's at the center of the American mystique. Larson, who never stopped striving (he was working as a waiter two months ago), was one of these people. His simultaneous death and triumph is a metaphor for the heartbreak and hope, the paradox of the American Dream.

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