There is death in “Rent” – death from AIDS, the modern plague that has supplanted the tuberculosis that killed Puccini’s Mimi. But by “resurrecting” Mimi, Larson emphasizes the irrepressible surge of life. The first impact of “Rent” is the astonishing humane violence of its vital spirit, embodied by the youthful multicultural cast who perform with an ecstasy of commitment that is irresistible. In a way they are playing themselves: Puccini’s 19th-century Left Bank bohemians have become late-20th-century struggling artists in New York’s Alphabet City in the East Village.
“Rent” focuses on three couples. Roger (Adam Pascal), a musician desperate to write one great song before he succumbs to the plague, falls for Mimi (Daphne Rubin-Vega), a dancer at an S&M club who is doomed by drugs and HIV. Another HIV victim, the drag queen Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), loves Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin), a computer teacher dubious about the cyberworld of virtual reality. Performance artist Maureen (Idina Menzel) has a stormy relationship with her lesbian lover Joanne (Fredi Walker). Maureen’s ex-lover Mark (Anthony Rapp) is a would-be filmmaker who serves as spokesman to the audience. Ben (Taye Diggs) is the landlord who threatens to evict the artists from their loft. Any whiff of artists’ superiority is dispelled by the homeless, who scorn the young people as “bleeding hearts.”
Did you just mutter that you don’t give a damn about these people? You do, as Larson presents them in their juicy, confused, sexy, sex-scared, hopeless, hopeful humanity. His songs (there are 33 numbers) seem to leap straight from his characters’ hearts. The title number is a fierce anthem of rebellion in a world where “Strangers, landlords, lovers/Your own bloodcells betray.” Larson writes several kinds of love songs: Roger’s and Mimi’s yearning “Without You,” Angel’s and Collins’s compassionate “I’ll Cover You,” a blazing, witty duet for Maureen and Joanne, “Take Me or Leave Me.” Director Michael Greif has a fine feel for the dynamic theatricality of Larson’s music: a song will start as a solo, become a duet and ignite into a choral outpouring driven by a great onstage band led by Tim Weil, reinforced by the funky, un-Broadway choreography of Marlies Yearby.
Larson’s score is the post-Sondheim musical’s most successful attempt yet to fuse the eclectic energies of contemporary pop music with the needs of the theater. His versions of gospel, rock, reggae, even a tango, add up to a brilliant portrait of the crazy cubistic face of today’s pop. “Rent” completes a marvelously fortuitous trilogy that started with “Hair” and went on to “A Chorus Line.” All these breakthrough musicals deal with “marginal” Americans: the flower children of the ’60s, the gypsy dancers who sweat and smile on Broadway, and now the young people who follow the often quixotic dream of art in a chilling time for soul and body. These shows make their characters emblems of a striving that’s at the center of the American mystique. Larson, who never stopped striving (he was working as a waiter two months ago), was one of these people. His simultaneous death and triumph is a metaphor for the heartbreak and hope, the paradox of the American Dream.
