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'Rent' still rocks
For Anthony Rapp, performing with “Rent” in 2010 is like traveling back in time.
“It’s almost like going back in time to an earlier version of myself as well as the character,” said Rapp, referring to Mark, the role he created in the early 1990s in Jonathan Larson’s Broadway musical smash hit.
When “Rent” comes to the Overture Center on Tuesday, Jan. 26, it will bring a dose of nostalgia for some of Rapp’s fans, too. He and Adam Pascal, the original Roger, headline the tour of “Rent” currently traveling the country.
“There was something great about the immediacy that we all had” in the original, Rapp said. “It was so close to all of our lives, such a direct reflection. Now going back to it, all the life we’ve all lived in the meantime has informed it.”
More than a musical, “Rent” was a late-’90s cultural phenomenon, becoming the soundtrack for an angry yet hopeful generation. The sudden death of its young creator, Larson, catapulted the show into the headlines (and onto Broadway), and the infectious rock score kept it there for 10 years.
“No day but today,” the cast sang, and hundreds of people lined up to hear it again.
“‘Rent’ was the beginning of the Broadway lotteries for $25 tickets — everyone wanted to see it,” said Meghan Randolph, founder and artistic director of Music Theatre of Madison. “‘Rent’ has this presence. It’s become one of those musicals in recent years that everyone seems to find. And it’s absolutely still relevant.”
“Rent” took Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera “La bohème” and placed the characters in 1990s New York City, endowing them in the process with drug habits, HIV and money troubles. Roger and Mimi fall in and out of love. Mark keeps everyone at arm’s length with his camera, and Collins loses his lover, Angel, to AIDS.
Like Puccini’s work, “Rent” is a product of its time. Before the drug cocktails, AIDS was a death sentence. Dot-coms were about to boom. Nobody had cell phones and people used ... answering machines.
“You’re living in America/at the end the millennium,” Roger and Mark sing in the song, “What You Own,” an angry paean to a society that has forced them to sell out. “I don’t own emotion, I rent.”
Now, though, those two actors are pushing 40, a good decade older than their characters. Rapp estimated that he’s performed Mark more than 1,000 times.
“With a good show, good material, you ride the wave of it and it takes you,” he said. “All I have to do is make sure I’m open and present and looking ... it never feels rote.”
Nostalgia, he insisted, can be a good thing — cathartic and galvanizing.
“Early in the tour in L.A., people said ... how much more powerful it feels all these years later,” Rapp said. “With the economic situation, people are more aware of and compassionate to the notion of struggle, that struggle and crisis can happen to anyone and not just people on the fringes.”
Of course, there will also be fans in the Madison audience encountering “Rent” as a live show for the first time. Olivia McCrary, a 16-year-old junior at New Glarus High School, said she saw the 2005 film of “Rent” in the theater.
“I was just in awe,” she said. “Most musicals are kind of corny, they all have the same story. ‘Rent’ was just different.”
Young audience members familiar with the film might be surprised that the musical is sung-through, a true rock opera in the vein of “Jesus Christ Superstar” or, more loosely, “Hair.”
Those who weren’t “Rent”-heads the first time around may have a chance to revisit a play they originally judged harshly.
“In the mid-’90s, I was like them, an artist struggling to find his art in NYC,” Andrew Abrams, artistic director of Four Seasons Theatre Co., wrote in an e-mail. “All I could think about when I watched that show was, ‘Why do these people think they shouldn’t have to pay rent? I certainly have to. I have to work a regular job just to survive.’”
But he liked the music, and because of the themes it addresses, Abrams conceded that “Rent” is still relevant. Randolph, too, said that “Rent” “woke people up to what musical theater can still do,” from its dark tone to its confrontational stance on contemporary issues.
“What (Larson) set out to do was bring the MTV generation into the theater,” Randolph said. “I’m trying to think of a show that touched hearts the way ‘Rent’ has, and I can’t think of one. It opened that door for shows to go out there and hit on major issues and still be successful.”
