Popular Music

Stereo Review
December 1, 1996
By R.G.

Jonathan Larson, who diead last January just as his musical Rent was about to take the theatrical world by storm, had four artistic fathers: Gerome Ragni, James Rado, Galt MacDermot, and Stephen Sondheim. The first three made Broadway rock--albeit in a way that was safe for the Fifth Dimension--when they co-wrote Hair. The fourth became a well-certified genius by warping and woofing the musical-theater conventions of structure and content (an operatic tribute to a murderous barber?).

Rent takes a number of cues from the world of pop, just as Hair did. Bits of pop-rock, pop-R&B, and pop-Latin scoot through the score, making the affair by turns pretty, sweet and tart. And there is a sentimental optimism in this depiction of New York City squatters with artistic pretensions, linking it less to La Boheme, the fatalistic opera it re-makes, than to Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein's fable of redemption. There may be anger here, but it isn't' the anger of punk. There may be dysfunction here, but it isn't' the dysfunction of grange. You leave the theater humming, not scowling.

So maybe Larson's notion of the East Village is a little too digestible, but you can't deny the energy of his creation. That's where the Sondheim influence comes to bear. There are very few songs her in the traditional Broadway sense; the somewhat fragmented music combines and recombines to create a mood, to reveal a character, to propel the story forward. Many of the numbers that have specific titles actually are mini suites. "Another Day," for example, starts with a squabble between the leading lovers, Roger and Mimi, that resembles, in its tone and change of pace, Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Then it evolves into a live-for-today paean whose rhythmic percolations recall the Police's "Don't Stand So Close to Me." Here, as elsewhere, the musical shifts are combustible, and the effect is even sharper on disc than onstage. Album producer Arif Mardin vividly brings out details--a crunchy guitar riff, a pleading melisma--that got lost in the stalwart but unshaded performances I saw in New York's Nederlander Theater.

Larson's story and lyrics could have been more refined; his bohemian characters seem to lack any real purpose, since they aren't so much artists with a burning need to create as they are rebellious adolescents with an alarming taste for hard drugs. But the musical's charms, as well as its limitations, are youthful. The great tragedy of Rent is that its creator, who died at 35, never had the chance to see his talents mature.