Hello and Goodbye

The New Yorker
By John Lahr

By some terrible irony, the restaurant next to the Minetta Lane theatre, where a memorial service for the composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson was held last week, is called La Boheme. Puccini's opera was the inspiration for "Rent," Larson's rock opera (at the New York Theatre Workshop), and the show features, among forty well-sung numbers, three songs that are as passionate, unpretentious and powerful as anything I've heard in the musical theatre for more than a decade. Larson died of an aortic aneurysm on January 25th, a few hours after the dress rehearsal of "Rent." He was thirty-five. Larson's name is new to me, but his talent and his big heart are impossible to miss. His songs spill over with feeling and ideas; his work is both juicy and haunting. That's why, after seeing "Rent," I ended up at his memorial service. I found out that Larson was a rangy, goofy-looking guy with jug ears and a funny grin; that he grew up in White Plains; that he had the capacity to love and be loved; that he'd done six downtown musicals with suitably quirky titles like "Tick, Tick...boom!," "J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation," and "Superbia"; that he waited tables at a SoHo diner to support his musical habit; that he dreamed of earning enough money from his writing to splurge on cable TV; and that he believed, like Gatsby, in the green light and the orgiastic future. "Count the green flags, not the red flags," he told his friends. He also talked about his crazy ambition to bring the musical up to date: "Rent" is billed as "The Rock Opera of the '90s." Larson is certainly not the first composer to take aim at that elusive target, but he may be the first to have hit it. His gift for direct, compelling, colloquial lyrical statement seems to prove that the show tune can once again become both pertinent and popular. Over his desk Larson had posted the motto, "Make the familiar unfamiliar, and make the unfamiliar familiar." Whatever the problems of the production, the score of "Rent" achieves the astonishing feat of marrying the musical's old sense of blessing to the society's new sense of blight.

The landscape of "Rent" is a gray and disheveled loft space and environs in the Lower East Side's Alphabet City. "The curtainless set seems more like a pile of junk than a set," Larson's stage direction says; and waste is the right metaphor for this soiled, threadbare world of artists, addicts, and the homeless--the compost out of which the lost souls in "Rent" try to grow their dreams. Here poverty, and not abundance, is the musical's issue. "No Visa No Mastercard/No Amex/No travellers' checks/No dollars/No cents/No," a chorus of Village venders sings. It's Christmas, and the holiday provides an ironic frame for the uncharitable events in "Rent," which include the eviction of a group of artists from their loft. In fact, every assumption of the traditional musical has been stood on its head. The old romance of triumph has been replaced by the new romance of despair. Now lovers don't meet cute, they meet infected. Roger (Adam Pascal), a young songwriter struggling to write one good song before his light is snuffed out, falls for Mimi (Daphne Rubin-Vega), a strung-out dancer; both are HIV-positive. The drag queen Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia) camps up catastrophe in his seduction of Collins (the smoky voiced Jesse L. Martin), a young teacher who ends up giving him safe harbor. "Yes," Angel sings, "This body provides a comfortable home/For the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome." Mark (Anthony Rapp), a would-be filmmaker who bears witness to the group's eviction battle and earnestly tries to take the moral temperature of his times, asks, "How can you connect in an age/Where strangers, landlords, lovers, your on blood cells betray?" Death is the climate in which this musical lives. The air is full of loss--loss of home, loss of dreams, loss of life. Sounds like Sondheim territory--well, in a way it is. Larson won a Stephen Sondheim Award for "Superbia" and a Richard Rodgers Development Award for "Rent." Although he wasn't a Sondheim clone, he was definitely a disciple; he even works his decidedly uptown mentor--a Broadway baby if there ever was one--into a rhymed catalogue of downtown bohemian icons: "To Sontag/To Sondheim/To anything taboo..." (At the memorial service, a college friend recalled long late-night talks with Larson about "why Stephen Sondheim was God and Jerry Herman the enemy.") If Larson doesn't have the word-hoard or the technical skills of a Sondheim, neither does he have the glibness. Larson was more emotional than his showy hero. His songs have urgency--a sense of mourning and mystery which insists on the moment. "No day but today" is the show's last sung line--at once a plea and a philosophy.

The aroma of "Rent" may not be sweet, but it is also not sour. Larson's gift was for the elegiac, which celebrates both grief and gladness. He uncovers the poignance in his characters' panic--a manic quality that suits rock's electrified sound. This combination of gravity and grace is best expressed in the opening of Act II, where fifteen actors come to the foot of the stage and perform Larson's gospel song, "Seasons of Love." ("I broke up with a girlfriend because she said I couldn't write a gospel song," Larson is reported to have told a friend. On the evidence of the inspired and subtle simplicity of "Seasons of Love," he was right to leave.) The song is an anthem and also kind of an epitaph:

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure -- measure a year?

In daylights -- In sunsets
In midnights -- In cups of coffee
In inches -- In miles
In laughter -- In strife

In -- Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in the life?

Larson's answer is "How about love?/Measure in love," and Gwen Stewart, in the chorus, embellishes the lines with elegant gospel riffs. In Steve Skinner's shrewd arrangement, the song is reprised in the middle of the act in counterpoint with a reprise of a beautiful, heartbreaking blues, "I'll Cover You." Larson really seems to have known about love. By merging the refrains of the two songs, he combines the sense of time passing with the sense of affection. The moment of connection is powerfully immediate and reverent. Collins sang the words to Angel in Act I. Now, at Angel's funeral, he sings to the coat that was Angel's gift before laying it on the drum that substitutes for his dead lover's casket:

Open your door
I'll be your tenant
Don't got much baggage
To lay at your feet
But sweet kisses I've got to spare
I'll be there -- I'll cover you

In a few cunningly harmonized phrases, Larson evokes both love's gift of solace and the longing for it. "With a thousand sweet kisses I'll cover you," a soloist sings along with Collins' testament to his unequivocal love: "If you're cold and you're lonely/You've got one nickel only." Collins and the company continue, "Oh lover/I'll cover you/Oh lover," as the refrain merges with the eloquent "Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred moments so dear." The tenderness of the singer and of the song hits an audience like a punch to the heart.

At the memorial service, a "Rent" cast member said that he once gushed to Larson, "I think you're going to change the American musical theatre," and Larson replied, "I know." Perhaps Larson might have--but not, I think, with the din of rock opera. The problem is not with Larson's songs but with the nature of song itself. The pleasure of rhyme runs counter to analysis. The audience can't really reflect while it's being ravished. As a result, character detail dissolves into a few brushstrokes of attitude; plot points are briefly addressed, only to be lost as one song piles on top of another. "Rent" tells eight separate stories, but as a structure the through-sung musical can't support that kind of narrative overload. Inevitably, the theatrical shorthand of "Rent" makes it wobble. What you get is a song cycle tricked out into a notional story whose events are not so much dramatized as indicated. The musical becomes a kind of soap opera of song. The artists are evicted, then not; Mark sells out to network television, then doesn't; the quarreling lesbian lovers Maureen (Idina Menzel) and Joanne (Fredi Walker) break up, then don't; Mimi resolves to shake her drug habit, then doesn't. In all this to-ing and fro-ing you can feel Larson and his director, Michael Greif, struggling to take the musical to a new dramatic place--and if it's not a total victory, it's not a defeat. Greif and the lighting designer, Blake Burba, seem to have fallen under a brutalist downtown spell, and display a kind of willful disregard for entertainment values. Many of the stage pictures are smudged, but, despite its shambolic action and slovenly set, there's a weird power to the piece. This impact could have been magnified by a more rigorous cutting and rearranging of Act I: its rhythm is off kilter, and it should end with "La Vie Boheme," Larson's uptown Broadway number extolling downtown life. Here Greif's staging is crisp and funny. "To riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits," Mark sings. "To fruits, to no absolutes/To Absolut, to choice, to the Village Voice, to any passing fad/To being an us, for once/Instead of a them/La Vie Boheme." The song builds to one last raspberry at the straight world: "To sodomy," the cast sings (just in case we didn't know if we were teetering on the brink of fashion). "It's between God and me/To S&M/La Vie Boheme."

"Rent" could use more streamlining, more color, more revision. But all that hardly matters. By the end of the evening, Larson's talent has taken the audience to places where the musical, with its boulevard frivolity nihilism, never ventures these days. "Rent" dares to embrace the ugly and the beautiful, the sin and the miracle. And, if it naively rants at American capitalism at thirty dollars a seat ("And when you're living in America/At the end of the millennium/You're what you own"), at least it's asking about justice, and not, like "Starlight Express," about whether a steam engine can find happiness with an electric train. Larson clearly had his eye on the prize. He wanted to be great, and he had great ambitions for the musical theatre. He puts this single-minded pursuit of his craft, this drive to redeem his time on hearth, into Roger's "One Song Glory," an apotheosis that now feels eerily prophetic:

One song
Glory
One song
Before I go
Glory
One song to leave behind...
Find
Glory
In a song that rings true
Truth like a blazing fire
An eternal flame

Larson would have been thirty-six last week. He was just beginning. Go see his musical and remember his name.

© The New Yorker