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Rent November 27, 2005 |
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It’s too bad the real world isn’t a musical, because if it was, all the negativity, sadness, death, and fighting we see daily on the news might just be that much more acceptable. Here’s Anderson Cooper, reporting from a water ravaged New Orleans, singing “Dry Your Eyes, Proud Land”, and there’s Terry Moran belting out from a Bush conference “Buck Up, Mr. President”, followed by the crowd pleasing tenor of Wolf Blitzer’s elegiac “War, What Price Glory, What Price Honor?”, and capped off with the grand finale, “Learn From Your Past”, sung in the tune of a marching band anthem by the duet of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. We could call it “The Daily News Follies”, three acts of bad news scored to uplifting hooks and arias, sung by all your favorite news anchors, giving hope where hope is needed, light where only darkness rules, and meaning to a world without much reason. It’s a good idea, I know, but alas, it’s already been taken, sort of, in 1996, when Jonathan Larson took a similar idea, eccentricity, poverty, homosexuality, and AIDS, all hot topics, and wrote it into a tune-happy epic musical called “Rent”, which quickly became the talk of Broadway, scooping up major awards and making millions for the man who, tragically, never lived to see any of it. Musicals, in the classic sense, are not supposed to have such controversial topics (Annie shoots a gun, and the Sharks and Jets wield knives, but a musical never before employed heroin addiction and lesbian marriage into its plot), but Larson’s rock opera, adapted from “La Boheme”, and channeled through “Jesus Christ Superstar” with a remarkable spirit of originality, was written specifically to break taboos, and show The Great White Way that AIDS and gay lifestyle wasn’t restricted to the symbolist prose of “Angels in America”, but could serve as the basis for a show packed to the rafters with one brilliant song after the other. It worked, and “Rent” has been running steadily ever since, and now, after much speculation and years of debate, a film version has been released, and if it lacks the show’s originality, it keeps its energy and message, and for nearly two and a half hours, gives us the upside of struggle, through infectious love ballads, rock anthems, and socially conscious lyrics. The song-heavy story is set in a one year span from Christmas ’89 to Christmas ’90 in the bohemian poverty row of New York’s Alphabet City, where a core group of starving artists struggle with love, drugs, AIDS, and yes, rent, with the help of strong friendships and even stronger show tunes. Here’s a cast rundown: Mark (Anthony Rapp) is a struggling filmmaker flatting with Roger (Adam Pascal), a guitar rocker who contracted HIV from a dead junkie girlfriend, and is reluctant to accept HIV positive stripper, and sometimes heroin addict Mimi (Rosario Dawson) into his heart. Their gay, HIV positive friend Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin) comes back to town with a new lover, the eccentric and lovable Angel (Tony winner Wilson Jermaine Heredia), whose demise in the second act is the show’s, and film’s, emotional crux, suggesting that it’s always the happiest character to go first, simply because good succumbing to reality, and sickness, makes for better drama. Filling out the cast list is Maureen (Idina Menzel), Mark’s former performance artist girlfriend who is now the lesbian lover of lawyer, non-bohemian Joanne (Tracie Thoms, of “Wonderfalls”, if you remember that), and Benny (Taye Diggs), the landlord of the building and newfound yuppie, an ex-friend of the clique who is the show’s primary villain, threatening to padlock the rent-free doors if Maureen’s anti-capitalist demonstration isn’t stopped. The thin plot is just a jumping board for the songs, all catchy and memorable, that feature themes of love (“I’ll Cover You”, “Your Eyes”), hope (“Seasons of Love”, which tells us how many minutes make up a year, and asks of us how we’re going to use them), joy (the rousing “La Vie Boheme”), pain (“Without You”, “Goodbye Love”, “Life Support”), anarchy (“Rent”, “Today 4 You”), and fate (“Another Day”). It’s a fine roster of tunes, and the cast, lip synching to their already recoded vocal tracks, gives it the necessary levels of energy and emotion to pull it off without looking too phony, or too stagy. Bottom line, if you’ve heard the CD soundtrack to the show, the film’s soundtrack will sound awfully similar, but when the tunes are as good as they are in “Rent”, that’s definitely a good thing. From a list of potential directors that included Spike Lee, Sam Mendes, Rob Marshall, and Baz Luhrman, the directing duties eventually fell to Chris Columbus, a director who knows just enough about saying “action” and “cut” to helm a film that is basically a stage show with jazzier sets and camera movements. One wonders what kind of visual trickery previous musical directors Marshall (“Chicago”) and Luhrman (“Moulin Rouge”) would have brought to the adaptation, or what moody symbolism the controlling Mendes and Lee may have adopted to the dark, yet uplifting saga, but maybe that’s not what the show’s fans wanted, maybe they wanted a strict adaptation, where the original 1996 cast (most of them anyway), could act out their characters and songs for a viewing audience that never had the chance to see them on Broadway. If that’s what they wanted, that’s pretty much what they’ve been given, a faithful adaptation that incorporates the bulk of the show’s mammoth song list into individual set pieces, while tuning up the virtually dialogue free show with spoken filler material to calm an audience weary of an all-singing production. It’s a movie that sometimes feels unauthentic, falling to the trappings of mobilizing a one-stage story with a visual palate giddy on swooping cameras and boring high angel shots (there’s little Busby Berkeley or Bob Fosse in this film), but for all its awkward pacing and presentation, the songs and cast are still sterling, and if “Rent” is less groundbreaking on film in 2005 than it was on stage in 1996, it doesn’t much matter, because with music this powerful, the message it brings will always be relevant, no matter what decade, political climate, or visual format. The real world may not be a musical, but musicals about the real world are an entirely refreshing alternative to your grandmother’s musical, and “Rent”, a great stage show, makes a respectable escapist movie, here on the cusp of another troubled 525,600 minutes. “Rent” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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