by Robert Israel
Rent, 20th Anniversary Tour – Book, Music, and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson. Directed by Evan Ensign. At the Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont St., Boston, through November 10, 2019.
Twenty years ago I attended the musical Rent at the Shubert in Boston, the very same theater where it is being performed anew. I have some vivid memories of the show back then that were rekindled when I attended this current, electrifying touring version. Today’s version has more pizazz, more spunk, and it sparkles, as if the cast has each imbibed a hefty swig of Kool-Aid doused with adrenalin. The production is spirited and is well worth attending.
Back in yesteryear when the touring company visited the Shubert from New York, the set was not as ornate, the sound design not as high-tech, nor were the costumes as fetching. I seem to remember gazing upon the Shubert’s back wall, a homely red brick façade. The production was more stripped down back then, bare bones. While there was a marvelous energy to that production (I remember one cast member literally jumping into the orchestra pit), overall, the tone was more somber, the mood more gray. It told the same story about a rag-tag group of friends who are barely subsisting in Alphabet City in Lower Manhattan during the AIDS/HIV crisis that decimated the population there in the 1980s. But that was 20 years ago, when we were all more closely affected by the crisis, and the show told that story with a sense of the funereal.
There is sadness the saturates this new production, but it’s not the same, because the overall color scheme is more candy-colored, sadness doesn’t drain the liveliness out of the cast (they are not only talented singers and dancers, but they can – and do – leap in the air like acrobats). The musical numbers, piped into the Shubert’s sound system, are loud and brash. And because all cast members are wired to microphones, when they sing loudly, you feel it from the tips of your toes to the crown of your noggin.
The story, loosely based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme, tells of a group of friends living and shivering in a building where heat is generated by a makeshift woodstove and electricity stolen and then funneled into the living quarters via a long extension chord. Mark Cohen (Cody Jenkins) is filming everything (he aspires to be an auteur), and various friends come and go, streaking across the stage, from wing to wing, telling us, in song, of their hopes, dreams, entanglements with lovers, and miseries. There are scenes aplenty of drug and alcohol abuse, gay and straight lovers are shown embracing, groping, and knocking boots; love in the air, and, yes, there is death.
The story is a microcosm of life today– it could take place during any age — when any ragtag group of creative people congregate with personal histories to share, with personal demons to exorcise (or not), and with songs in their hearts (and stars in their eyes). What makes Rent so fascinating is that is that the cast seems so wide-eyed and fresh, one hardly believes they are struggling, let alone suffering. Paring back the play (eliminating scenes, for example, when actors simulate recorded telephone messages from the outside world – we get the message after the first sixteen calls), would help telescope the story to where it most needs to be told. But otherwise, the play is taut and the running time efficient.
There are must-see performances, and kudos goes to the outstanding Alyana Smash as Mimi Marquez, who astonishes with each scene she dominates, and to the tall, dark and handsome Shafiq Hicks, who plays Tom Collins, from whom we feel the deeply expressed pangs of loss.
Rent features a score that is now part of the Great American songbook, and one of these songs, “Seasons of Love,” is given a heartfelt harmonious treatment, with the entire cast standing on the edge of the Shubert’s stage, singing about living our lives with love, and in the pursuit of love. It’s one of the most memorable moments in an evening of many such moments. For tickets and more information, go to: https://www.bochcenter.org/buy/show-listing/rent-2019
