Toronto critic pans Anthony Rapp's WITHOUT YOU

[frontrowcentre2]

There was a favourble review in the Toronto Star, but this critic states his feelings clearly in the first line.
I hated Without You.

[Kelly2]

Saw this at NYMF a few years ago, thought it was self-indulgent tripe.

[faithzilla]

I'm not very surprised. The book felt equally self-indulgent. After the initial (only mildly interesting) tidbits about Larson and the beginning of Rent, it just dragged. The whole book would have faired much better as a simple essay discussing loss in his life and how Rent touches on that. It was boring enough to read the book over an extended period of time, I can't imagine having to sit through it.

[fashionguru_23]

I read the book of Without You, and while I understand that it is suppose to be a personal story, it seemed very much like, "Look at me! I did Rent! Bow down to me! I'm going to milk this all I can!"

[SporkGoddess]

That summarizes my feelings about Rapp in a nutshell, tbh.

[FindingNamo]

To be fair, the guy makes it clear he can't abide the personal testimony aspect of performance that emerged in the 1960s. Rapp seems like a mighty small fish to fry in that discussion.

[SueleenGay]

So is this like the musical version of The Year of Magical Thinking?

[someone.else's.story2]

Hmm, I actually really liked the book. It was definitely more about his mother dying than RENT, but I found it really interesting and heartbreaking. I guess, to each his own.

[Platypus]

I did enjoy the book, as well. But I definitely enjoyed the insight into the early years of RENT much more than the personal stuff. There was just so much detail about his childhood that I just didn't care about, which is probably some of the "self-indulgent tripe" that some people here are referring to. In terms of the his show, I felt that it only really skimmed over the emotions that were described in the book, so it didn't really have much of an emotional impact for me. However, like the critic said, I very much enjoyed his performance. More high energy than his performance ever was in RENT and more impressive vocals than I've heard from him before. But the only reason to ever really see his show would be as a RENT fan. If I went in to it knowing nothing about RENT or the history of the show, I just wouldn't care about his sad story.