Rent, San Francisco: a review.

This post is going to be of limited interest because it is of a production that has already closed. Oh, and it has spoilers. And it is really, really long. But I have to write it anyway, because I'm obsessed.

I am a Renthead.

Obsession is never a pretty thing, but this one is relatively innocuous, as long as you don't live in my house and have to listen to "Rent" and "What You Own" on the car stereo all the time.* (The only other public evidence of my obsession is the Jonathan Larson quote over to the side, from "La Vie Bohéme.") I am pretty much older than the standard age demographic for Rentheads, but that's okay... it's never too late to have a happy childhood, as they say; or an angst-ridden, creatively-challenging, bohemian, early-adulthood, as the case may be.

I came rather late to the party, having been introduced to the music by the Rent, the movie . I had gone to see it because Jesse L. Martin (Collins in Rent, Detective Ed Green on Law & Order) is on the short list of actors I would pay good money to see read the phone book. The fact that he can sing the phone book -- and wonderfully -- is merely lagniappé.

I liked the movie. A lot. Then I got the soundtrack for Christmas. Not the movie soundtrack, but the complete Broadway soundtrack.

I fell in love.**

Rent is close to an opera; listening to the soundtrack, you can understand much of the plot. That's not surprising since it is based on Puccini's La Boheme. When my husband got us tickets for the last week of its San Francisco run (third row center, yet!), I was delighted to have an opportunity to see it on the stage.

I left the theatre vaguely disappointed.

Why? Was it overfamiliarity with the material? Was I mentally comparing the actors on stage to their screen counterparts?

No. I was not bored by the material, and the performances I loved the best (by Warren G. Nolan, Jr. playing Collins*** and Tracy McDowell playing Maureen) were the ones that deviated most from their screen counterparts. And there was the joy of seeing "Christmas Bells," my second favorite piece from the soundtrack (which was missing from the movie) actually performed.

Part of it was that Jed Resnick, who played Mark Cohen, the chief protagonist, sang in a very clipped manner, making it difficult to hear him clearly. But mostly it was a matter of chemistry. As in: there was none between the two most significant characters.

You might think, given the play's origins, that the central relationship is Roger and Mimi. It's not.... it's Roger and Mark. Unless you can believe that the two of them matter to each other, that it is more than a relationship born of convenience and the high cost of living in New York, the play loses its emotional center.

In the production I saw, Roger and Mark seemed like roommates, not friends. They were like the people you roomed with freshman year in college and then never really saw again once you moved out and got a room of your own. In the play's climactic confrontation between the two in the moving "Goodbye, Love," (a number which was criminally cut from the movie), Roger should be lashing out in frustration and anger at a friend who is forcing him to face his tendency to run from unpleasant situations. Mark, likewise, should be hurt and angry, but not pitiful. Instead, in the production I saw, Roger was annoyed and disdainful, Mark was ... pathetic, like a puppy cringing, expecting to get kicked.

In an interview with Sirius Satellite Radio host Seth Rudetsky, Rent Executive Producer Kevin McCollum once said that it was vitally important that the characters in Rent never be portrayed as pathetic. Confused, yes, and struggling to find their way, but never pitiful. And he was absolutely right: once the characters become pitiful, you stop caring about them. And I didn't care about the Mark I saw -- I wanted to smack him and say "Get a grip!" (Which is interesting, in a way: in watching the movie, it was Roger --played by Adam Pascal -- who I kept wishing I could slap and say "Snap out of it!")

The magic of theatre is its ability to draw us into other people's lives. But first, those people have to let us know their story is worth caring about. That just didn't happen for me, at least not with Mark. And as good as the other stories were, his is the lens through which the other stories are filtered.

My disappointment with Mark notwithstanding, I still found joy in the performance. There were many wonderful moments: "Christmas Bells" provided a kaleidoscope of sound; "Take Me or Leave Me " had two divas standing toe-to-toe and not giving an inch, singing fire at each other; and "Light My Candle" -- an intricate conversational duet with a Latin beat -- oozed sensuality. "I'll Cover You", with Warren G. Nolan and Ano Okera as Angel, was joyous and exuberant, everything a love song should be; its reprise was heartbreaking.

The most stunning moment was the most unexpected. In the movie, the song "Will I Lose My Dignity?" is sung over a shot of the support group for people with AIDS, showing people around the circle disappearing. It is about people dying from this very grim disease. Very sad. Very moving. Very detached.

In the play, the song is begun by one person in the support group, then another, and then picked up by all the characters... even those without AIDS. The song is not about "them," about people who are dying.... it is about us, about all of us:

Will I lose my dignity? Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

Not just about AIDS, but addiction, loneliness, poverty, depression ... the human condition. Simple. Beautiful. Devastating. I started crying halfway through the number.

That number underscores one of the reasons I adore this work: its charitable and loving view of people. There is a great line (among very many) in "La Vie Boheme" which says "To anyone out of the mainstream... is anyone in the mainstream?" -- a recognition that we are all individuals and none of us fit nicely into boxes.

My love for Rent remains, my less than spectacular night at the theatre notwithstanding. I'm sure I'll have a chance to see it again sometime. And if not? I still have the music. That glorious, challenging, heartrending music.

Viva lá vie Bohéme!


* What you don't hear on my car stereo, at least when my kids are in the car, which is almost all the time, is my favorite number, "La Vie Bohéme." I figure that I can live without getting calls from my youngest son's school saying he is going around singing "Sodomy...it's between God and me..." Given my youngest son, he would, too. It's a catchy melody, he likes to sing -- what's the problem?

** And fell out of like: after hearing the entire Broadway soundtrack, I became really irritated with the movie. The producers played it safe, choosing to do a more traditional "musical" rather than an "opera." One of the consequences of that was the searing "Goodbye, Love," part of which is a confrontation between Mark and Roger: the director said that they couldn't keep it in the movie because they hadn't had Mark and Roger singing together before. The reason they hadn't, of course, was that they chose to jettison the opera format. Cowards.

***As much as I love Jesse L. Martin, his Collins never rang quite true to me. Supposedly a genius computer programmer/anarchist who was kicked out of MIT, he always seemed too ... cool for MIT, in a sort of street cool way. (Okay, yeah, I know, I'm stereotyping.) I could believe he went to Harvard, yes, but MIT, no. When I saw Warren G. Nolan as Collins, I thought "Not only did he go to MIT, he lived in Senior House." His Collins was more ... goofy, playful. I knew people like that who went to MIT.