Rent: 20th
Anniversary Tour
Jonathan Larson (Book, Music & Lyrics)
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| The Cast of Rent: 20th Anniversary Tour |
A year ago, “Rent: 20th
Anniversary Tour” rolled into San Francisco for a multi-week run at the Golden
Gate Theatre, resulting in many rave reviews from critics and audience members
alike (including this reviewer). A year
later, the tour that began in September 2016 in Bloomington, Indiana arrives
for just a week at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts as part of the
current Broadway San Jose season. Since
this is essentially the same show with only some changes here and there in key cast,
the following is an update of my “Theatre Eddys” review from a year ago.
Unfortunately, while
the opening night still earned an immediate standing ovation and while I still
found many things to like and several times to tear up with deep-felt emotion,
there was not the consistent and sustained energy and electricity of the Golden
Gate outing of February 2017. The San Jose show is particularly suffering from
a venue’s sound system that left – especially in the first act – many of its
brilliant, fast-spilled lyrics often unintelligible. That is a shame and something that hopefully
is corrected as the week progresses. But
overall, the integrity of this anniversary version remains; and my guess is
that both veterans and newcomers to the show will still find much to relish.
And now for the updated
review from February 9, 2017:
Twenty years ago, onto a Broadway stage burst a sexy,
soaring musical daring to give unforgettable faces and personalities to seven
artists struggling to survive not only their East Village poverty, but also the
plague of AIDS/HIV that appeared ready to wipe out an entire generation. Two decades later, Rent is no less relevant and timely than when it won multiple Tonys
in 1996 (including Best Musical), as witnessed by the heart-warming and
heart-breaking production now sixteen months into its national tour at Broadway
San Jose’s Center for the Performing Arts.
The characters and their stories that are largely based on Puccini’s
1896 opera La bohème still bring both
laughter and tears in great quantity as they did in ’96; but in early 2018, the
musical seems particularly apropos once again.
Lines like “How do you document real life when real life is
getting more like fiction each day?” sound sadly too current. Scenes of ignored homeless on dirty,
drug-laden streets mirror the scene throughout the Bay Area and beyond. The threat of young artists losing their
funky, warehouse abode is right off the headlines of today’s newspapers and
social media. The timing for this revival tour could
not be more eerily perfect with its message that transcending all these very
real and troubling issues is the power of unconditional love for all -- no
matter gender preference, race, sexual orientation, economic status, or even if
dying from society’s still most-shunned disease.
Not only was the dark subject matter of drug-using and
hungry street people along with the subject of AIDS and its effects on New
York’s artistic community startlingly bold when Rent premiered, other new ground was broken for the American
Musical at the time. Its rock opera
approach introduced numbers sounding much like recitatives, arias, duets, and
grand chorus numbers of Puccini’s original but done with electronic pulses and
pounding beats that introduced a new generation to classical themes in a way
that they could hear and understand. The
result in 2018 are musical numbers that have entered the Great American
Songbook as classics and can be hummed and sung in well-know phrases by a
generation that may or may not have even seen the original production in its
twelve-year run on Broadway or all its tours.
“Seasons of Love,” “Another Day,” “La Vie Bohème,” and “Take Me or Leave
Me” (among many others) and the ubiquitous “five hundred twenty-five thousand,
six hundred minutes” are now etched into our collective psyche forever.
Rent: 20th
Anniversary Tour takes the original and updates it with neon-hued energy,
freshness, and contemporary feel that zings and snaps from beginning to
end. Evan Ensign directs this large and
talented cast with an eye to pushing those original, daring boundaries even
further to edges that are raw, painful, and yet utterly beautiful. The set of Paul Clay is massive in scope with
its multiple and climbing levels of twisted metal and stairs against the Golden
Gate’s back brick wall. The lighting of
Jonathan Spencer provides hints of Christmas against the dark dreariness of
poverty and illness while offering looming, gigantic shadows that hint of the
threats of abandonment, eviction, and death.
Angela Wendt’s costumes sparkle, shock, and satisfy all at the same
time, bringing this old story a new look of today’s starving in the streets and
hungry in the studios.
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| Kaleb Wells & Sammy Ferber |
With his camera ever in hand, aspiring documentarian Mark
sets out to record a year in the life of his current and former artistic
roomies and their lovers and friends. A
strong-voiced, intense Sammy Ferber is joined by a stage full of his cohorts
climbing, jumping, kicking, and literally flying in all directions while urging
him on in “Rent,” singing in loud, rambunctious voices multiple protests of
their plights: “We’re not gonna pay last year’s rent, this year’s rent, next
year’s rent ... ‘Cause everything is rent.”
Mark is still getting over his break-up with his old roomie
and lover, Maureen, whose new girlfriend is Joanne (Jasmine Easler, also with
great singing pipes and a member of the 2017 show in SF). The two rivals
discover a surprising symbiosis of their common ills with the cheating, but
highly seductive “diva” as they dance and sing with dramatic flair in “Tango
Maureen.” The focus of their past and
present love is arranging a Christmas Eve benefit show to protest eviction of
the homeless from a vacant lot where another former roomie, Benjamin Coffin III
(a somewhat underwhelming Marcus John) wants to put up a new studio for
artists.
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| Lyndie Moe |
The over-powering personality and attractive dynamism of
Maureen eventually splashes in full body gyrations, hair-flinging dips, and
over-the-top poses as Lyndie Moe sings in crazy ranges of voice her avant-garde
rendition of the child’s rhyme, “Hey Diddle Diddle” in her stellar performance
of “Over the Moon.” As the year
progresses and her relationship with Joanne begins to look like a yo-yo with
their habitually attracting and repelling
each other. However, the two come
together for a sexual, sensual “Take Me or Leave Me.” In doing so, they also provide a key theme
and message of Rent, “Take me for
what I am, for what I was meant to be.”
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| Skyler Vople & Kaleb Wells |
Other pairs of lovers are equally impressive in the story’s
telling. Mark’s roommate, Roger, who is
depressed about his HIV and a girlfriend’s recent suicide, strums repeatedly a
few chords on his guitar in “One Song Glory” as Kaleb Wells introduces us to
his captivating, soul-stirring vocals while he searches for “one song before
this virus takes hold ... one song to redeem this empty life.” Into his life comes a erotic dancer of seedy
nightclubs, Mimi, shivering in the heatless, dark warehouse where they are both
seeking refuge. Mimi seeks a match to
“Light My Candle” as well as Roger’s warm body for comfort. With a voice that mixes teasing seduction,
tongue-in-cheek humor, and starving desperation into one bundle of stellar
performance, Skyler Volpe fails to win Roger this time; but she is not one to
give up. Her drive is fully witnessed as
we see her dressed in skin-tight blue in a cheap club scene singing “Out
Tonight” in a voice meant for Vegas while dancing as if making love to the
balcony’s bars in front of her. (Both
Mr. Wells and Ms. Volpe are fortunately still with the tour as they were last
January.)
The two will struggle to find their relationship equilibrium
and will deliver some of the evening’s more heart-piercing, deeply emotional, and
truth-telling numbers – ones like “Another Day” and “Without You” that are now
iconic among the musical’s fans. Each
singer performs with a genuineness that reaches to the farthest, back seat in
the balcony. Kaleb Wells in particular
brings rock-star quality time and again to his singing and probably has the
best voice in a cast (as he also did a year ago in San Francisco).
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| Aaron Alcaraz & Josh Walker |
A cross-dressing street drummer -- racked by AIDS and hunger
-- finds an injured, mugged philosophy teacher on the street named Tom Collins,
a friend of Mark’s and Roger’s. There is
immediate attraction between the giant of an African American man more teddy
than grizzly in his huge form and the undersized, dangerously thin drag queen
performer, Angel. The story of their
love and devotion is at the core of Rent’s
emotional pull on its audience. Josh
Walker (Tom) and Angel (Aaron Alcaraz) deliver one of the musical’s best love
songs, “I’ll Cover You,” in which Angel sings, “Live in my house, I’ll be your
shelter” and Tom replies, “Open your door, I’ll be your tenant.” Angel’s glittering red lips and outlandish
elf attire and Tom’s look of lumberjack cement into a tender love that cannot
help but inspire even the hardest of hearts.
To balance the gripping moments of personal, romantic, and
social-issues drama threading throughout Rent
are small and big numbers often full of humor and winks to the audience. Homeless gather to sing about Christmas
coming, always ending with a funny, but cynical remark comparing the world’s
celebrating to their street-bound non-party.
Nasal-sounding mothers with aristocratic airs (Yale Reich and Chrissy
Naruo) leave phone messages from far-away resorts to their almost-homeless and always-rebelling
kids. But it is when the whole cast
executes with full gusto the gymnastic choreography of Marlies Yearby that
fireworks truly happen. The Last Supper
imitation of twelve friends gathered in a café after Maureen’s concert on
Christmas Eve is a fabulously produced rock number (“La Vie Bohème”) with its
hilariously and precisely coordinated movements of necks, shoulders, fingers,
heads, hips, and abdomens along with a dozen bodies gyrating in chairs, on and
under the table, and over the entire floor.
Twenty years have only made this then-hit once again a
show still well worth seeing and current in its messages. While the San Jose opening night had some
hits-and-misses in terms of delivery that were absent a year ago, my guess is
that these were due to venue and maybe some just to ongoing road
wear-and-tear. But there is still much
to revel in the individual and collective performances, the brilliant script
and sets of lyrics, and all of the still-memorable music of this current,
touring Rent.
Rating: 3.5 E
Rent: 20th
Anniversary Tour continues through January 28, 2018 at
the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts as part of
Broadway San Jose, 255 South Almaden Boulevard, San Jose. Tickets are available online at http://broadwaysanjose.com.
Photo Credits: Carol Rosegg
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