Amy Laburda last wrote about Oklahoma!
When I was 14, Rent was important to me in a way I find it hard to overstate.
My parents were well used to my latching onto a musical and playing the cast recording over and over again. But when I toted around Phantom of the Opera five years earlier, I didn’t need a perfectly trained memory to know when to turn down the volume so my parents didn’t know people said “fuck” in this show, and when to hit skip so “Contact” never played in their hearing. Most of the time, however, I could avoid taking such precautions, as my two-CD cast recording practically lived in my Discman, with its whopping ten seconds of skip protection.
I was a theatre kid raised in an urban section of the Midwest, and had as much firsthand knowledge of New York City as I did about the Paris of Les Misérables, but I loved the music. Rent became a sort of cultural currency among the theatre kids in my high school. We made a competitive/collaborative show of sing-shouting “La Vie Boheme” in the hallway after school, a feat of both memory (given its We-Didn’t-Start-the-Fire-esque catalogue of lyrics) and boldness (it took a special sort of Hoosier teen to yell “SODOMY, IT’S BETWEEN GOD AND ME” on school property in the early 2000s).
All of this culminated in a group of us going to see the show on tour my sophomore year. We all squeezed tightly into the car of the one person who was old enough to drive the rest of us. When seeing a show to which you already know the entire score, it’s sometimes easy to be disappointed. But I remember simply being thrilled both with the show itself, and with the feeling — elusive for me at the time — that I belonged with the group of people around me.
My freshman year of college, I was assigned to room with the woman who would soon become my best friend. I was a bit of a mess that first semester, socially and emotionally, but she was great to me from the beginning. Early on, she asked how I felt about her putting up her collection of showcards and theatre production posters. One of them was the very same Rent poster that had graced my bedroom back home.
A photo of the author’s copy of the poster hanging in her adolescent bedroom
Instead of going to the big, sexually daring dance that was the centerpiece of our campus that fall, she and I stayed home and watched the original cast recording of Into the Woods instead. We bonded over Rent most of all — she’d seen it more than once, and had a similar place in her heart for it. She was particularly fond of Collins (and of Jesse L. Martin, the talented actor who portrayed him in the original cast and would later play him in the movie). I now suspect this was a sign of her maturity, since Collins is one of the least narcissistic characters in the show.
She also introduced me to Tick, Tick… Boom!, a chamber musical adapted from a musical monologue Larson had written and performed in 1990. We listened to the cast recording often, discussed arranging one of the songs for three female voices instead of two males and a female (a plan which never came to anything), and compared and contrasted Raúl Esparza’s vocal quality with that of Anthony Rapp in Rent. To this day, a musical cue from a song in Tick, Tick… Boom! is my ringtone for her.
I’m 29 now — well, almost. Three weeks shy. I live in New York City, though I haven’t actively done any theatre for about four years. A friend invites me to see Tick, Tick… Boom!, staged by City Centers as part of their Encores! series. She’s unfamiliar with the show, but knows Larson and knows I’m into theatre.
The performance is stunning. Literally, in that I feel physically stunned. I am not sure whether it’s the difference in my age or my life circumstances, or just the difference between listening to a recording and seeing a show performed in front of me, but so many aspects of the show strike me in new ways. Songs I was not particularly fond of bring the house down. Jokes I’d only ever read pop to life on stage. The sense I have, as an audience member, is of being in on the joke — witness Larson’s clever tribute to/send-up of “Sunday” from Sunday in the Park with George — but of also knowing more than the characters do.
The show, explicitly autobiographical, predates both Larson’s death and the success of Rent by about five years. Character-Jonathan’s struggles with his artistry are recast in the light of an artist who will die young, before he lives to see the outrageous success of his work. But within the world of the show, Jon only knows he hasn’t yet written anything that anyone wants to produce, and that he’s coming up on thirty and feels pressured to decide whether to stick to the work or compromise before he gets stuck waiting tables his entire life.
Yet while Jon has plenty of pathos, the audience knows he’s a stand-in for someone extraordinarily talented. As a 29-year-old New York transplant, now I can’t help but feeling for his best friend, Michael, and his girlfriend, Susan. Michael gave up acting and has found career success as a marketing executive, yet he longs for family and a more domestic sort of happiness. It’s a longing made doubly poignant by the fact that his character is gay, making his dreams unlikely in 1990, and ill — though it’s never made explicit — almost certainly with AIDS. Susan wants a family too, but most importantly, she’s done with the constant war that being an artist and a woman in New York entails. She takes a job in Massachusetts, where she can presumably afford a nicer place to live and a more sedate quality of life, leaving Jon behind.
Rent is a show about young people. Mimi is 19; Collins and Angel are presumably older than the rest, but I would peg most of the characters in their early to mid-twenties. Tick, Tick… Boom! is a show focused on people who are about to leave their twenties behind. Characters are critical of themselves and critical of the world in a different way — Jon’s complaint that his generation is complacent and wary of optimism frankly acknowledges the challenges of attempting shake people out of that apathy. It’s a world away from getting residents of a tent city to moo with you. (Bless, Maureen.)
Both these shows have places in my heart from which they will not be budged. But what makes them interesting are the different ways I view them when I return to them over time. As I change, they change, too. Take Rent’s Benny, for example.
Especially take him when he is played by Taye Diggs.
He’s an almost cartoonishly villainous character on the surface — a betrayer on many levels, but perhaps worse, a “sellout.” When I first encountered the show, I didn’t bother looking much more deeply at the character. I’m certainly not going to defend Benny (his misogyny alone is pretty vile — though, let’s be real, so is Roger’s). But Larson does cleverly slide in a lot of small clues about his character that can, when rounded out by the artistic choices of an actor and a director, point to intriguing places.
The audience knows that Benny once lived with Mark, Roger, Roger’s girlfriend April, Collins, and Maureen. As someone who has lived in New York with four roommates, I can only imagine what it would be like to have the ability to not only move out, but to buy the entire building. Also, anyone living with two couples — at least one pair of whom was heavily using drugs, the other of which involved chronic infidelity — would want to get out any way they could.
We also don’t know what “ideals” Benny “once pursued,” but in “You’ll See,” he makes clear that he has some artistic ambitions of his own. Michael, the infinitely more sympathetic Tick, Tick… Boom! character who abandons his art in order to support himself, notes that there comes a point when you get sick of not being able to eat. We don’t know this, but I’d be very surprised if Benny comes from a background like Mark’s — one where he has a safety net waiting in Scarsdale — based on the way he and other characters talk about his wife, Alison, and her father.
Benny’s choices clearly make him unhappy, but not necessarily because of the wealth itself. Instead, his desire to get out of a neighborhood where people “piss on [his] stoop every night” alienated him from his former friends. Meanwhile, he seems to be trying too hard in his new world. He comes off as an outsider everywhere we see him, yet he can’t resist returning and returning to the former friends who clearly don’t want to see him anymore. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Benny is sympathetic to me when I return to the musical these days, but I certainly think there is a lot going on with him I missed the first time around.
Also, Roger and Mark, you really should have gotten that free rent agreement in writing, guys.
Part of what makes Larson’s work endure is not only that it hit at a moment when the AIDS crisis met the disaffection of the generation coming of age in the early to mid-1990s. And it isn’t simply that Larson told the culturally resonant story of La Boheme in a new way. As Christopher Isherwood noted in his New York Times review of the revival of Tick, Tick… Boom!, the show feels as if it could have been written “yesterday, or today, or tomorrow.” While both Tick, Tick… Boom! and Rent are musicals deeply rooted in their respective times and places, they also include sharply drawn observations about human nature. Even — sometimes especially — the ugly parts.
Just as a great deal of Rent swag reads, the show suggests that you “measure your life in love”: this is one thread of many in Larson’s work. Personal relationships matter deeply, but they are as likely to amplify as to smooth the flaws of the people involved. We make each other better, and we also make each other worse. Both Rent and Tick, Tick… Boom! contain a great deal of hope and a great deal of cynicism. How those balance (or fail to) can largely depend on the choices made in a particular production.
Audience members also bring their own views and backgrounds along when they step into a theatre. Even when you know a show intimately — perhaps especially then — where you are in your life and who you feel like when you encounter the performance adds another dimension to its shape. These shows meant different things to me at 14, and 18, and 29. I have little doubt they’ll mean still other things to me at 34, and 38, and 49.
Then again, sometimes I still just want to yell-sing “La Vie Boheme” alone in my apartment because it’s fun. Larson was a composer who captured how it felt to be deeply alive and connected to the world around you. As much as I’ve changed, that’s something I’m just as hungry for now as I was fifteen years ago.
So–what did you think about the 2006 film, then? Using the same-but-two cast, now solidly in their early 30s, to tell the same story?
(god I love this article and everything about it)
There’s probably something to be said about the prolonged adolescence that has become commonplace among “””millennials””” – you know, the way we’re not getting married and settling down and are “finding ourselves” well into our 30s? and how the casting reflects the way millennials aren’t growing up or something?
but in reality I hate that attitude and those “THE DEATH OF ADULTHOOD” pearl-clutching thinkpieces that it breeds because they usually end up placing the blame on young people for “not growing up,” rather than blaming the baby boomers who fucked up the economy and made it near-impossible for us to have steady employment/houses/families. I honestly didn’t think that much about what casting 30-something people implies; I just figured fans wanted to see That Cast and the filmmakers obliged.
Thanks so much!
I try to avoid yucking anyone’s yum where the movie is concerned, but it didn’t work for me for a variety of reasons. The cast’s age was definitely one of them; I’m as emotionally connected to that cast as anyone, but it’s a show in which the characters make a lot of bad decisions, and I think having them (apparently) a decade or so older makes it much harder to be sympathetic about that.
(True story: I got into an argument with a friend’s father shortly after the movie came out over whether or not Mark and Roger should have just paid the damn rent in the first place. This was 100% an argument I should have just let go, and I would like to apologize to said friend because I should have just let his dad be wrong about a plot point that the movie didn’t make clear.)
That’s totally fair, and for the most part, I agree. It’s much, much more difficult to be sympathetic toward them in the film.
There were a lot of dubious decisions in the movie, starting with the choice to have the recitatives spoken instead of sung, so it plays like people are just standing around reciting terse, inexplicably rhyming dialogue. My biggest complaint (other than no *Contact,* WTF, movie?) is that Maureen’s serial cheating is all but erased, so that Joanne comes across like the irrational, controlling bitch who complains every time her girlfriend talks to someone else. Was that done just because Idina Menzel had a fanbase and the new Joanne didn’t, so it seemed politic to make Maureen the “more sympathetic” one? It’s bizarre and pretty gross, honestly.
That said, I enjoy the movie. I probably enjoy complaining about it even more.
It’s a crime against god and nature that the movie omitted “Contact.” Are we really rolling that far backwards? The pearl-clutchers have even taken our goddamn Rent? Never forgive.
Also I am now chair-dancing to the recording of La Vie Boheme playing silently in my head.
A lot of my experiences echo yours – I was deeply, obsessively in love with RENT in middle and high school, to an extent that I now find embarrassing. As a naive teenager, I wanted the life those characters had; I thought the starving-artist existence was terribly romantic. I’m glad I realized my lack of artistic inclination long before I ever actually tried to live that life. Even at the ripe old age of 24, I find myself more sympathetic to Benny and more able to relate to the characters in TTB. But I know if I listened to “What You Own” right now I’d probably still cry. (I would NOT, however, cry at Seasons of Love, because like anyone who was in high school in the mid-2000s, I have heard and sung that song more times at more graduation ceremonies than I can count.)
(TL;DR: all of what you said.)
this is mostly unrelated, but I have negative associations with TTB despite loving the music. The one time I tried to go see a performance of it, the ticketing system was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever experienced. We were supposed to call the theatre and leave a message with our names and the number of tickets we wanted. “We will call you if there is any problem; otherwise, just show up and claim your tickets the night of the performance” the instructions said. So we called and reserved 3 tickets, didn’t hear anything, so we showed up at the theatre where of course they had no record of us. It’s been 9 years and I’m still angry about this.
I think “Seasons of Love” is the “Heart and Soul” of a certain subset of theater kids. Any free piano equals someone inevitably starting the opening chord progression.
Instead of going to the big, sexually daring dance that was the centerpiece of our campus that fall, she and I stayed home and watched the original cast recording of Into the Woods instead.
Excellent choice! That and Talking Heads were practically the soundtrack to my childhood. Music you hear at that point in your life has a way of really getting into your bones, and I dearly love Into the Woods to this day.
This is so great! I remember being at summer camp and watching two of my friends bond by singing Light My Candle at each other while we walked to the dining hall. I saw a production a year or two ago where the way they staged Without You made SO MUCH SENSE. As someone who’s never really been into that song, it was kind of amazing to see it snap into place.
(Also, the relationship I had in college that is set in my memory to me, headphones in, listening to all of Last Five Years while my TTB-loving roommate does her homework.)
Also also: Dearly beloved, we gather here to SAY our goodbyyyyyyyes …
(dies irae, dies illa…)
Here she liiiiiiiiiiies, no one knew her worth
the late, great daughter of mother Earth!
On this night, when we celebrate the biiiiiiirth
OH, college relationships that can be encapsulated by the Last Five Years.
(Me too, me too, me toooooooo, god all this nostalgia hurts so good)
I love me some L5Y but my last big, all-consuming, heart-breaking relationship drama was soothed by Chess on repeat. What? It’s got some good songs in there about falling in love and betrayal and growing up and moving on.
Now I’m curious, because I confess, I never really loved Without You either.
(Also +1 on Last Five Years, that was also in heavy rotation.)
Without You has worked for me exactly twice:
1. In the movie (YES I KNOW), where it’s a montage, because I think it’s actually meant to be a montage but those can be difficult to stage effectively? One of the reasons I usually skip it on the album/don’t like it in the show is that it’s so intentionally monotonous, and it’s hard to build levels into that. Maybe?
2. In this staging, where they zoomed out from Mimi and Roger and made it more about everyone. Kind of a “nightclub singer is surprisingly applicable to our everyday lives!” kinda deal, with a good portion of the cast just onstage dancing with each other. So it felt less like “Mimi and Roger and their paaaaaain” and more like “relationships are full of hard things.”
This almost mirrors my life and experience with RENT and TTB exactly, except my mother took me to see both of them–RENT in 7th grade and TTB in high school. Imagine being 12 years old, pre-Google, and asking your mother what AZT was and why everyone in the show had to take it. It led to a LOT of discussions about the AIDS crisis that a Central Illinois preteen probably (definitely) was not prepared to have. No one at school was on board with RENT yet, so I spent a lot of time trying to explain it to people, which didn’t win me a lot of friends.
Anyway, thank you so much for writing this.
This is great, Amy, from one theater kid to another, who sang Rent as a teen with friends not in the middle of the midwest, but at an Orthodox Jewish school. Fun times! I know Rent by heart and have seen it three times, but I find as I get older (and more cynical, yeah) that it’s not the deepest show around. In terms of staying power and character depth, I much prefer Tick Tick Boom.
Also, this: http://biblenauts.com/pomophobia/comic/comic/rent…
That comic is perfect. (And yes, I still love the songs anyway…)
I went through the RENT obsession phase in high school too, but I still listen to TTB even as an “adult”. Beyond the subject matter, the music just feels richer and more interesting. I’m also deeply, deeply jealous that you got to see the revival because LIN-MANUEL AND KAREN TOGETHER OH MY GOD THEY ARE AMAZING WHY DON’T I LIVE IN NEW YORK.
Come live in New York!!! Love, your BFF who is sorry she never listened to TTB when you sent it to her nine years ago but of course loved it when she saw it at Encores.
This piece was really lovely and spoke to how I felt about a lot of my musical obsessions in middle school and high school. I’m waiting for a show to grab me in the way they could back then, but I haven’t found one recently. It might be a little like how there aren’t as many books these days that I get obsessively lost in, the way I could ten years ago.
I was never really a RENT fan – I was, and am, a Sondheim Person – but I connect with this, except with Merrily We Roll Along instead. My definition of adulthood is finding you’ve shifted allegiances from Act 2 / young Frank to Act 1 / old Frank.
My opinions on RENT, at any age, have always aligned with David Rakoff’s. https://soundcloud.com/missjessicadavis/david-rak…
OMG, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. I am *not* particularly a Sondheim person, but that show is an underrated gem. Write more, work hard (Leave your name with the girl) Less avante garde! (Leave your name with the girl) And while I still think Frank is kind of a jackwagon in any time period, in my 30s I developed a shockingly intense love of “Now You Know.” It is pure, distilled Truth.
“Now You Know” was another big milestone in my achieving adulthood. More musicals should be open about the fact that life is crummy.
Hey, it’s possible to go both ways! I love RENT and adore, adore, ADORE Sondheim. 🙂
Sondheim adores Jonathan Larson — he even (SPOILER) has a cameo in tick…tick…BOOM! — so this can go both ways. 😀
Despite the piece above, I’ve also long loved David Rakoff’s take, because David Rakoff.
Also, Merrily We Roll Along is great, and I wish more people knew about it.
I posted this downthread but yeah, this sums up my thoughts.
(My definition of adulthood is finding you’ve shifted your opinion on Phantom from “OMG the Phantom is the most romantic guy EVER” — thankfully I was never in this phase — *and* from “Raoul is the best guy ever and so romantic!” to “both of these guys are possessive and scary, maybe in various degrees but still both, and also Carlotta was actually kind of OK.”)
Just to say that I also grew up far, far from New York City (Oregon, in my case), yet worshipped at the altar of musical theatre. The Tonys were must-see TV for me, and I loved musicals so much that I introduced/ingratiated myself to strangers on the internet (hi, M!) back when there were only like twelve people on the internet, and acquired various bootleg recordings from them. [Insert rant about kids today who have it so easy with Youtube and DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW TO HOOK TWO VCRs TOGETHER] My college dorm walls were covered in theatre posters and playbills. And, yeah, as a former choir geek, I still know all the words to “La Vie Boheme.” Yay, this piece.
Ahhhh RENT. Such a perfect thing to be obsessed with in high school. Also, thanks mom for taking me to see it in NYC when I was 13 and not questioning it’s appropriate-ness for a 13 year old. You’re the best.
I was in my early 20s when Rent opened and loooooooved it. I am now basically unsympathetic to any of the characters (although Collins is still the best), but still love singing the songs!
And would still like to have “I’ll Cover You” at my wedding. I realize that would take a special kind of lady-marrying man.
Oooh, that’s a thought. We *did* stay up until 2am on Saturday singing along with YouTube RENT videos…
(for serious, this happened, no exaggeration, because one of us mentioned snow and we both started singing “And it’s beginning to snow…” and it all just spiraled from there.)
Aw! But seriously, I am now stopping myself from quoting every line of that song at you. Where ever, whatever, I’ll be your coat!
WITH A THOUSAND SWEET KISSESSSSSS
I have always wanted it at my wedding, too! It’s such a beautiful song. The reprise at Angel’s funeral still KILLS me, especially when Collins’ voice breaks on “when your heart has expired.”
LOVE
So many feelings on this. RENT was my introduction to larger musical theater, and I can see how it aged and I grew and it doesn’t mean the same thing to me anymore, but it still has great meaning to me, which makes it really annoying when people just sing “AIDS!” at me.
tick…tick…BOOM! is a show I’ve seen twice, and each production has been absolutely perfect.
I also own the “Jonathan Sings Larson” CD, which has demos and songs that never made it into RENT or TTB, and it’s rough but a gem. http://www.psclassics.com/cd_larson.html
Thank you so much for writing this.
I’ve had a roller-coaster of feelings about Rent.
I moved to a new town in 8th grade and still felt like an outsider when I started high school the next year. The theater kids, the cool kids in my mind, worshiped Rent. So I did too. But I never learned the show quite well enough. I certainly could not get through La Vie Boheme without stumbling. And besides, I was too late. Most characters had already been cast for singalongs (did other groups of friends do this?). Collins, my favorite character, was already accounted for. Joanne, my other favorite character, was accounted for, and besides, I was too self-conscious about my voice to sing outside my vocal range anyway. All that was left was The Man. I accepted my role. I’m cool.
High school on, there was something in me that took my excluded feeling and turned my love of the show into dislike. As soon as I got the idea to dislike Rent, I found no shortage of legitimate gripes with the show to draw on. Mark, our protagonist, is a self-absorbed, ridiculous human being. Roger is petty. Maureen’s flaws seemed unforgivable and I couldn’t stand Joanne putting up with her. I wrote off the show as simplistic, romantic garbage.
And it may be, but at its core, Rent is delightful. And I got older, I became able to look past my hangups with the play and see that. I appreciate the play for its flaws. In particular, I got new appreciation for Mark, who is self-absorbed, yes, but becomes aware of that and struggles to change. I like Mark now. I like Roger now. I’m working on Maureen but give me time.
Now, my wife and I have our own singalongs. And I can be whoever I want.
WHAT A GOOD PIECE!
Rent spoke to me excessively as a tiny queer child growing up in the Midwest, in much the same way The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the L Word did. I didn’t recognize any facet of them, but I wanted so badly to live that life. DEFIANCE! SPARKLES! SEX! etc etc.
But man, the older I’ve gotten the more issues I develop with Rent, with the exception of Collins and Angel because they are perf and I will throw down with anyone who says otherwise. Cheating isn’t cute Maureen! Pay your fucking rent Roger and Mark, for fuck’s sake!
Thank you so much for writing this – it’s both great and has prompted me to blast TTB in my headphones at work and struggle not to sing along (esp. Therapy – god this musical is amazing)
xoxo,
a firm TTB partisan bc rent reminds her of how embarrassingly obsessed she was as a high school theater nerd in the midwest
Ohhh this is a great article. You said it all so well. After a crazy-obsessed Rent phase at 16, I just went through another at 25, and it was so different. I cry every time I hear the “I’ll Cover You” reprise now, even though it never meant much to me at 16; I want to smack Roger when I used to want to make out with him; and weirdest of all, I roll my eyes nonstop at all of them. Pay your rent! Get a real job! Stop using drugs! Make better decisions! But I still love it, and them.
Benny wants to set them up in a studio where their art will be subsidized! And yet it’s the worst thing ever!
Also, why is Mark urging Roger to date someone with the same drug addiction he just got over? That his now dead gf had! If my friend was recently sober I would not be urging him to get with someone who was an alcoholic. (things I was annoyed at the last time I watched Rent, though I do still love so much of it)
also Joanne. I am all in on team Joanne and that she was the only one who knew anything useful. She actually knows things like “tenant rights” which is kind of important.
All right-thinking people should be team Joanne.
Yes! Whyyyy was she wasting her time being emotionally manipulated by Maureen? TEAM JOANNE 4 LYFE
Wait, you’re saying that dedicating yourself to a profession and patronizing the arts and defending the public welfare and paying your bills like a grown up are somehow laudable? Psssshhhh, naw, those kids squatting in a building and making bad art are soooo much cooler.
(JK, team Joanne forever.)
Ughhhhhh this is so right. TTB made no sense to me at ALL when I discovered it at 14 — I should probably give it another go now. I did love “Sunday” even before I understood the reference, and it eventually pointed me toward Sunday in the Park With George which is my all-time favourite musical now.
RENT, I think, ends up being such a special experience for so many teenagers because it’s most people’s first exposure to contemporary musical theatre, where the characters are real people instead of witches and animated characters and nuns wearing curtains. When I was 14, I thought listening to RENT made me unbelievably edgy. Up until that point, all the musicals I liked were carryovers of my childhood, things my mother could also sing along with — The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, MAYBE West Side Story, the complete works of Disney. RENT had swears and a stripper. It equally satisfied my musical theatre obsession and my budding teenage rebellion. It resonated with me so deeply because I thought it was showing me something REAL about life and human nature. It doesn’t have that same effect on me now, but it still opened my eyes to all the possibilities of what kinds of stories musical theatre could tell and that has pretty much made all the difference.
Also, Amy, you rock and your writing on this subject is so great!
Like you, I went through my RENT phase in my early/mid-teens (it coincided with the movie coming out) and while I lived a long, long way away from Broadway, I did get to see a travelling production. I also came out to myself as bisexual within a year of first encountering the story, and the musical probably had a lot to do with that- I was sort of vaguely aware that GLBT people existed, but RENT was probably the first thing I’d ever encountered where GLBT characters were front and centre.
I wonder if, on some level, the hipster-ish disdain for RENT that a lot of people in their twenties and thirties espouse doesn’t come from a certain sense of post-teen years disillusionment. One of the big things that drew me to RENT was the sense of infectious enthusiasm the characters had for life and art- and of course once you leave your teens and are faced with all the challenges of adulthood, your response is much more likely to be “wtf pay your damn rent” than “fuck yeah, la vie boheme!”
For me, at least, I don’t think I’m rejecting the characters’ enthusiasm so much as their selfishness. Even as a teenager, I really hated Maureen and thought that the whole Angel-killing-a-dog thing was nuts.
I have a lots of friends working in the arts – I’m an arts person who now works in a “boring person” field that I actually love – and so many of them are generous, thoughtful people who have dedicated years of their lives to learning a discipline and give so much back to their communities. The characters in RENT aren’t anything like the artists I know; they reminded me far more of kids at Hot Topic trying way to hard to be *~edgy~* and *~different~*. For me, Joanne is pretty much the only sympathetic character in the whole play.
(Sorry, I have a lot of weirdly strong thoughts on RENT!)
I think I watched Rent too late — I was nearly 30, it was in the mid 2000s, it had aged poorly and I thought they were all jerks. (For various reasons I didn’t get into it when everyone else did, even though I love all sorts of other musical theatre, in the audience not on stage or backstage.) But you could just see how much of an incredible talent Larson was, and the music is great whatever you think of the plot or characters.
Into the Woods is my favourite musical, though I remain half-convinced that the entire thing was conceived around the line “If the end is right / it justifies the beans”.
Yeah, you really have to get into it in your preteen or teen years. Though even if you did, while the music holds up, the characters really do come off as jerks when you watch or listen to it when you’re older. If Mark were around today he’d basically be against having a day job because it gets in the way of him making shipper montages to post on youtube.
I’m creeped out that you apparently wrote this from inside my brain. Please do not reveal any secrets you may find there.
Great piece.
The major problem with this discussion is that it’s making me desperately want to skip out on track club tonight and instead go straight home with a box of Kleenex and giant tubs of popcorn and watch RENT and TTB and Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park and and and and
Like many commenters here, RENT was really meaningful to me as a young teen, and I still have a lot of feelings tied up in it even as my perspective on the romance of the bohemian lifestyle has shifted dramatically. One of my favorite things about being a long-time musical theatre fan, though, is revisiting the same shows over and over and getting totally different things from them at different ages. Like…
– Sondheim’s Company felt too unrelatable when I first heard it at 15. Then it became one of my favorite shows but also a source of massive anxiety about the future — that’s lessened for me, but I still haven’t reached the equanimity about it that my father, married for 30-ish years, has. He’s like, “marriage, huh, yeah, I guess it is complicated” and I’m still sort of in the Bobby-identifying space.
– The Last Five Years was crushingly depressing when my roommate and I saw it at 19, but when we revisited it at 25, we were like, “Yeah, this is really sad, but they are SO YOUNG, they have so much time to rebound from this, things are going to get so much better for them when they are not in a completely destructive relationship.”
I’m still not old enough to give a crap about Follies though, I guess.
Exact same feelings about Company, tbh
I know how you feel about Company. I’m either still a bit too young or a bit too not-surrounded-by-only-married-people to fully identify with Bobby even now, but it’s been interesting to see my reaction to the show evolve as I’ve gotten older. I didn’t really get it when I was 19 and obsessing over Sondheim in my dorm room. How could I?
(Now I’m kinda waiting for the time when I no longer overidentify specifically with “Lesson #8” from Sunday in the Park with George. I’m not sure age alone is gonna do that one for me.)
yes Maureen was awful. Now, protests can and do take many different forms, but how was that supposed to help the homeless?
You guys are all delightful. I want to take you all out for five miso soups, four seaweed salads, three soy burger dinners, two tofu dog platters and one pasta with meatless balls.
ew
it tastes the same
Is that it here?
It tastes the same.
If you close your eyes!
This was an amazing read, thank you. I’ve been frantically, tearfully obsessed with RENT, I’ve been embarrassed-ly dismissive of it, but I’ve settled into major fondness, plus enormous appreciation of the beauty and talent in the music and the young cast.
Also I named my blog after a line from the title song and it’s still my handle in all social media, so. WHATEVER.
L5Y: highly underrated, imo.
I am old. When RENT started its West Coast tour, I was the receptionist at the theater company that originated the tour (NPH is awesome). We had a CD player for our hold music–usually with Etta James on repeat. But when we did a musical, we’d of course use their soundtrack.
You can guess how much I LOVED putting people on hold when I knew “contact” was playing.
full disclosure, I LOVED RENT growing up (I might still have a T-shirt of it, my sister and I might have imaginary-casted ourselves as roles) but a friend showed me this and it’s amazing:
https://soundcloud.com/missjessicadavis/david-rak…
We’re almost the same age and RENT was definitely a huuuuge thing in middle school. I went to see NPH’s production of the show at the Hollywood Bowl a couple of years ago and felt pretty embarrassed about how thoroughly I’d loved it as a kid and not questioned any of it. Especially the dog-killing thing! How is it so cute and endearing to upset a dog to the point where it jumps off a balcony on purpose, for money? How is this played as a joke and how did not ONE of my friends even say, “You know, I love RENT but that part is messed up”? Like, there’s a lot problematic in RENT but most of it is defensible in one way or another…but Evita’s demise is just gratuitous.
I wish I could have talked to Jonathan Larson about how much of the show was meant to be satirical. Because as an Adult I feel like it only really makes sense as loving satire in some places now. And yet so much of it is so so so heartrendingly earnest…
Even at my most cynical there’s still a place in my heart for RENT. At the age when I first got into it, it pinged parts of my soul that nothing else even touched, and I do think I’m a better person for having loved it (and how many things can most people say that about, unequivocally?). But it would be very hard for me to recommend to a friend now if that friend were any older than about thirteen.
Man, I missed my annual re-watching of Jesus Christ Superstar this Easter and I've spent the six months since then trying to decide if I should just watch it anyway. I think it's too late; I'll have to wait another six months now…
I think I was born with a heart of coal because even as a teenager I thought that Benny was kind of sensible.
I have a lot more sympathy for the cast of RENT than a lot of my peers do these days. Demanding an entire year’s worth of rent that you’d promised was free is an incredibly shitty move! Roger has HIV- of course he’s mopey! Maureen has found an audience that likes her performances- good for her!
The one song I really can’t relate to, though, is “What You Own.” So, Mark, someone has offered to pay you for your chosen art for and it’s not pure enough for you? SEND THEM TO ME. I WILL DO IT. (Also, your mom doesn’t seem abusive, just annoying- would it kill you to talk to her?)
Thank you so much for this!! This was just what I needed to read!
I’ve gone through my obsessive love then dismissal back to love of Rent. I saw it on Broadway three times (none with the original cast, but incredible nonetheless). I really love TTB! I love singing Therapy while driving! I wish I could have seen it with Raul Esparza because his voiceeeeeeee and existenceeeee.
I identify with this post in a very deep way.
It had been a while since I’d listened to the full album (I’m a playlist maker by nature) and I was so disturbed when I realized that I…can see where Benny’s coming from (I mean, not all of it, come on). And that I think Mark is insane for turning down the Buzzline job. Oh god.
This was so great.