The New York Times

It burst on the scene seemingly out of nowhere, this pulsing musical with the beat and cadences of the East Village. Almost instantly, the glowing reviews started pouring in, and limousines began pulling up in front of the modest New York Theater Workshop, where the show opened last month. The show, of course, is "Rent," the acclaimed rock musical that was inspired by Puccini's "Boheme" and that is already bound for Broadway. "Rent" was quickly hailed as a rock opera for our time, a "Hair" for the 90's. Its reception has been made poignant by the fact that its creator, Jonathan Larson, died just before the opening, at the age of 35. The show really didn't arrive out of nowhere, though. It was born of one man's vision and determination. The story of how it came to be also serves as a reminder of the vibrant theatrical life that exists beyond Broadway and how that life nourishes Broadway. The making of "Rent" is a classic theatrical tale of luck, grit, ambition and, finally, applause. The cast is an ensemble, but each performer has a singular tale to tell. What the world of classical music can learn from "Rent."

The New York Times
By Bernard Holland

WHO HAS MUSICAL CULTURE AND WHO doesn't? A letter to the editors of this newspaper recently complained that young people don't. It's author used opera on the radio as a measuring stick. "I...remember walking from one end of the Yale campus to the other on a warm Saturday afternoon without missing a beat of the Metropolitan Opera broadcast through open dormitory windows," the offended correspondent writes. "Thirty years later, the same trip yields loud rock." A strong indictment, but of what?

Possibly the very culture the writer is trying to defend. Not that paying attention to long-deceased Italian composers is a waste of time. Study and appreciation of them and their music have meant a valuable life's work for listeners, musicians, and scholars alike. But to hold up the dead and the distant as exclusive standards by which educated end-of-the-20th-century young people are to be judged gives culture and art a slightly provincial tone.

I wonder if those first visitors to "La Boheme" at the Teatro Regio in Turin a century ago reacted much differently from the audiences currently being wowed by Jonathan Larson's "Rent," the rock-and-roll knockoff of Puccini at the New York Theater Workshop in the East Village. Sure, a number of them must have said: "What is this vulgar nonsense? Let's go back to 'Don Giovanni.'" But I suspect that many were kindred in spirit to the crowd I mingled with at "Rent" not long ago: 40 or under, inventively dressed, well-spoken and clearly educated. It was a crew genuinely curious about what the world around it right now had to offer.

"Rent," as you may know by now, transplants Puccini's beloved Bohemians to East 11th Street, gives them AIDS, rats and roaches, and sends them out into the world to a rock-and-roll beat. Critics have smiled; audiences have showed up. "Rent" is soon moving to Broadway.

From a musical viewpoint, I wanted "Rent" to be better than it is. A lot of the music is warmed over: somewhat tame and secondhand for its rough, drugged-up and disease-ridden Alphabet City surroundings. I live around the corner from the real thing, and what I see and hear on the streets has an edge that the earnest practitioners of "Rent" can't quite summon. My companion at the performance--and she is a bona-fide rock-and-roller--said it better than I, likening the music of "Rent" to one of those bar bands that play at roadside Holiday Inns on Saturday night. (We say: what?!)

There is also a college-dorm patness to the show's social politics: the victim-victimizer, good-evil, us-against-them dichotomies that seem a little too symmetric. Yet just as "Rent" starts trying the patience, it gathers energy. The cast is young, attractive, and filled with talent. It works endearingly hard. The ensemble interchange, a hip version of recitative style, is alternately clever and clumsy. The ghost of "Tommy" hangs over this show. "Rent" has no Pete Townshend to send it soaring, but it brims with good will.

WHETHER OR NOT "RENT" SUCCEEDS AS an opera, a musical, or anything else is beside the point for present purposes. The effort behind it and the sense of adventure it represents say something serious about a sophisticated culture trying painfully to crate a more inclusive art. If its young men and women do not listen to the Met on balmy Saturdays--if they do not know Verdi and Wagner--that is distinctly a shame. But the way to get Verdi and Wagner into their heads is not through letters like the one here.

Classical music, having carefully developed a two-centuries-old cult of the past, now finds itself in an ambivalent position. It rightly defends a repertory of great music by dead composers, but it has become distinctly inept at handling the present. The righteous indignation of our letter writer abets the suicidal tendencies of so-called high culture. High culture places its artifacts at the peak of a mountain and proceeds to push away the ascending creative minds that are not of its direct bloodline. Art like this retains its identity as do all closed societies: by rejection.

And here is another question. Can young people's ignorance of the classical tradition be any more ignominious and alarming than the classical music establishment's ignorance of the popular music that surrounds its everyday life, and indeed, dominates the world's attention? Almost all the thinking pop-music fans I know have a working knowledge of Beethoven and are curious to know more. Most classical music people of my acquaintance either bridle or stare blankly at anything outside their ken.

What, I wonder, does our writer understand of the subtle differentiations in Brazilian popular style? He says in his letter that present students "haven't a clue as to what the arts mean and their importance to a civilization." Maybe we should amend that thought to say that students to do not necessarily enter the walled-in cultural space in which the writer has decided the right kind of art should reside.

This letter, as you may have noticed, makes me mad, and for reasons that are a little oblique. As someone who has spent his life with classical music, I am alarmed for the future of its important artifacts. I don't know how we are going to save them. Isolating them with a sneer and a shrug from what responsive young people find important for themselves is a poor solution. Inferred from our writer's cry of cultural pain is an old refrain: "They don't make them like they used to." Maybe they are not supposed to.