Anyone who thinks “Rent” let its last drop of infected political blood long ago doesn’t know any fashionably angry teen who’s lived half her life under George W. Bush.
The Buell Theatre was full of them Tuesday for a raucous party that felt more like prom night than opening night.
It was the exhilarating return of the landmark Reagan-era musical that rocked Broadway in 1996, aided considerably by the heft and hunk of original cast members Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp, who were greeted like rock stars.
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“Rent” may seem inherently past due to some, but it hasn’t visited Denver since 2000, and something about it has clearly changed. Fated, furious writer Jonathan Larson exposed New York City as a wide-ranging social cesspool by the end of the Reagan era, but his musical didn’t open until almost a decade after it was set — under a president who actually did use the word AIDS in public. So, while rightly celebrated, “Rent” was also saddled with the “slightly dated” tag from the start.
But enough time has passed that “Rent” has evolved into a true period musical. Obama is now president, AIDS is no longer a death sentence, and, thankfully, fashions have progressed. And yet “Rent” powerfully connected Tuesday with a new generation of disaffected teens whose long-term memories precede January’s inauguration.
“Rent” is an alternately heart-tugging and blatantly self-indulgent affair. It’s the barrier-busting story of poor New York artists making their way through unemployment, AIDS, drug addiction, homelessness, homophobia, prostitution, violence, police brutality and racism. Slack-jawed older audiences may decry this departure from traditional musical form, but “Rent” is a direct adaptation of “La Boheme,” perhaps the most celebrated opera of all time.
Only here the poet (Pascal) is Roger, a straight, HIV-positive musician in love with AIDS-infected junkie Mimi (Lexi Lawson). His pal Mark (Rapp) is a straight guy whose girlfriend Maureen (Nicolette Hart) has left him for a black woman (Haneefah Wood). And strapping black philosopher Tom Collins (Michael McElroy) utterly falls, along with the audience, for the appropriately named Latino drag queen Angel (Justin Johnston).
Whether this is your first or 500th viewing, it’s clear by the time “Without You” fades out on these three embracing couples why The New York Times listed “Rent” among its “25 productions that defined the 20th century.” For all the love that bonds this tribe, “Rent” is laced with a rage that so many young people were so immersed in death by governmental ambivalence.
As both an “end of life” and “end of a way of life” musical, it’s plausible to suggest that Larson is the odd musical-theater cousin to August Wilson.
But “Rent” is also self-absorbed, repetitive, at times even bizarre. And it features the most cloying theme song in musical theater history (“Seasons of Love”).
The rest of the score is dotted with irresistible rockers and impossibly naked love songs. There is an unmistakable musical continuum here: Without “Hair,” there is no “Rent”; without “Rent,” there is no “Spring Awakening.”
The triumph of “Rent” is that Larson ultimately allows his cynicism to yield to a celebration of young people making joy and beautiful music out of misery and disease. In the end, it opens its huge heart into the gutter and lets its love flow like a cleansing blood.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
