Surprisingly (Or Not?), ​“Rent” Still Has It

(Opinion) The 20th anniversary tour of Rent, which played at the Shubert Theatre from Friday to Sunday, showed that — against a lot of odds — the 1997 musical about struggling artists in a vanished New York City still has legs.

I used to love Rent, Jonathan Larson’s 1996 musical bemoaning the death of bohemia and chronicling the terrifyingly rapid spread AIDS through New York City’s artistic community. When the show premiered on Broadway, I was 6 and living in Michigan. New York City might as well have been a foreign country. I learned about HIV and AIDS not through the musical, but through my mom, who worked with the Michigan AIDS Fund. I remember singing the much-beleaguered ​“Seasons of Love” with an all-school choir. It became a favorite for end-of-year concerts and graduations, even as the context of the musical was hundreds of miles away.

When I became a theater nerd in high school, the Rent soundtrack was required listening. The 2005 film adaptation, which reunited most of the original cast members, solidified this. It was edgy and romantic to hear a couple doing a duet of Roger and Mimi’s ​“Light My Candle,” during which Mimi searches for a misplaced packet of cocaine in Roger’s apartment. I had a thing for Mark, a wistful filmmaker whose greatest burden does not seem to be his overdue rent, but his overbearing Jewish mother. There were many days I woke up wanting to be Maureen, whose explosive, Ani DiFranco-esque style of performance art stopped predatory landlords in their tracks. Of course they did; it was Broadway. 

At some point, though, I felt I’d grown out of it. I started to sympathize, just a little, with the landlord. I realized that the libretto was dopey. Yes, it features people of color and casts a drag queen in a major and fundamental role. Yes, it takes on a challenging, fraught history of disease. But compared to two other major works of the 1990s — Tony Kushner’s 1993 Angels in America and William Flynn and James Lapine’s Falsettos, which dive deep into the catastrophe of the AIDS outbreak — it falls short.

Twenty years later, I assumed Rent wouldn’t have aged well at all. 

I was very wrong.

If some musicals live or die with their cast and staging, Rent is one of them — and in the national tour, it lives, defying the very death of creativity its characters rage against. As company members rolled into the Shubert for warmups and sound checks around 3:30 p.m. on Friday, crews transformed the theater’s stage into 1990s New York City, when the East Village was being gentrified. Stage right, they made space for a live, onstage band and homeless encampment, where actors dressed in parkas and flap-eared caps would wander during the play. Stage left, scaffolding and a towering heap of ephemera signified the empty old warehouse where Mark and Roger live. Above them, a fire escape doubled as Mimi’s apartment, and scaffolding marked the space for an AIDS support group whose song ​“Will I” asks how patients can expect to preserve dignity after diagnosis.

As house lights came down and a slow, single guitar riff signified the opening of the show, a palpable energy spilled over the stage, and onto an audience of hundreds that had packed the orchestra, balcony, and box seats. Mark Cohen (Danny Harris Kornfield) arrived to cheers, pulling the audience back into the 90s as he gestured to his film camera, and introduced moody, recently-diagnosed roommate Roger (Kaleb Wells). Nailing Mark’s neurotic, quirky demeanor, Kornfeld fiddled with technical equipment, tangoed with rigid and regimented lawyer Joanne (Alia Hodge), and jumped on tabletops to decry the death of bohemia.

A few songs later, drag queen Angel (David Merino) drew wild shouts and hollers of yass queen from the audience as she strutted in in chunky black boots and a Santa Claus costume, jumping on the table to perform ​“Today 4 U” on an empty plastic create. She rocked ​“La Vie Boheme,” doing the best dry hump the Shubert may have ever seen. As she, clad fully in white, rose from a buzzing, bobbing white sheet later in the show, the staging of ​“Contact” (Angel’s worldly departure) became something divine, flooded with white light and explosive, ear-wormy vocals.

Mimi (Skyler Volpe) showed the audience what it meant to ride recklessness, balancing on the set’s scaffolding so precariously that a collective gasp was almost audible. Maureen (Katie LaMark) got the entire house mooing during her protest-based number ​“Over The Moon,” lowering herself to the floor with a guttural inhale and mooooo that had the crowd parroting it back to her. 

It seems that I had forgotten something about Rent: It works hard to defy stereotype, and sometimes, carried by the right cast, it succeeds. By ​“La Vie Boheme,” members of the audience were singing along — which the cast didn’t seem to mind at all. We were brought to tears during Angel’s funeral sequence not because of the strength of the script; we cried because we had fallen in love with her, and couldn’t imagine the play going on without her in it. As her partner Tom Collins (an extraordinary Aaron Harrington) launched into the reprise of “​“I’ll Cover You,” he looked up into the theater’s stage lights to revel trails upon trails of tears running down his face — a cry that caught on in the audience. 

That’s partly because, in some important aspects, Rent​‘s not dated at all. The play’s main concerns — about HIV, fitting in as trans, being out in communities of color, shaking stigmas, and making a living as a creative — still ring very true to life. 

“The theater community and the LGBTQ community is still reeling from this disease and others,” said actor Christian Thompson, who plays Bennie, in a talkback after the play. ​“It’s not cured, and it’s almost more dangerous now … we still need to fight for a cure. We still need to show that onstage. That still is someone’s life that needs to be onstage. That’s a thing that Jonathan [Larson] did — he wrote about universal themes…. That fight to be heard … is so relevant right now, especially in this country that is so divided on those lines.”

That’s what members of the audience came away with, too. Still thinking about the show on her way to Stamford Saturday morning, New Havener Daisy Abreu said she had ​“ugly cried” through the whole second half — just as she did when she saw it 20 years ago on Broadway.

So did Valerie Vollono, a teacher at Co-Op High School who worked with Shubert Education & Outreach Director Kelly Wuzzardo to present a unit on gay rights to students in Co-Op High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). There with Co-Op high school students for the performance and talkback, Vollono pointed to the differences between AIDS in the 1990s and now — and the ​“different generational perspective.”

Though in the end ​“it’s about people seeking to be seen as human,” she said. ​“So it’s very identifiable.”

Nineteen-year-old Gateway student Daniel Taylor, a self-proclaimed ​“theater geek” and Co-Op grad who identifies as bisexual, had fallen in love with Angel while watching productions of Rent on YouTube and listening to the music on Pandora and Spotify. 

“I think that LGBT youth don’t really know a lot about the history that goes behind the community, like Stonewall and the AIDS epidemic. Angel’s just a very small fragment of what really happened,” he said. ​“Seeing an LGBT character take the stage like that … it’s incredible. She’s still incredible.”

To hear more about the Shubert’s collaboration with Co-Op, check out the above interview from ​“Dateline New Haven” with Wuzzardo.