Review - Rent: At The Start of The Millennium

In a week where we've been reminded how even the classics of the American musical stage are rarely revived in Broadway or Broadway-bound productions without their deceased authors' work being anything from tweaked to drastically rewritten, it's very refreshing to see a major revival where the material has been kept as it was and the show has simply been creatively refreshed. Director Michael Greif, who staged the original New York Theatre Workshop production of Rent that quickly moved to Broadway, gives us a new Off-Broadway mounting at New World Stages that looks at the material from a wholly different angle without any noticeable changes to the late Jonathan Larson's text. While still a life-affirming celebration of youthful passions and the need to create, this presentation is grittier and more realistic than the original, performed by an excellent ensemble placing their own interesting stamps on what, after 12 years on Broadway, many would consider iconic roles.

Set in 1991, Rent follows a year of romantic complications and creative ambitions among a circle of friends in New York's Lower East Side, around the time when the area was both a thriving artistic community and a crime-ridden neighborhood of unkempt buildings with homeless families living in tents in Tompkins Square Park. Half the musical's eight main characters are HIV positive and how each chooses to deal with their fate supplies the emotional current beneath the eclectic score's abundance of heart-touching melodies, comical jauntiness and rock anthem exuberance.

In 1996 Rent was played on a mostly bare stage with a boisterous company dressed in colorful garb - the skintight electric blue pants, the endless striped scarf, the furry pink bra - emitting jolts of rock star energy. The mood is more subdued now, and though occasional rock concert qualities do pop up now and then (particularly as the company dances a frenzied frame around the action during the title song) this is a Rent that, instead of exploding at you, invites you in to smell what's simmering.

Set designer Mark Wendland places the action in a maze of fire escapes, storefront gratings and metal framework representing the cold emptiness of an East Village side street. Minimal light shines through tall loft windows and, for the first act, there's a bit of color in the background coming from Christmas tree lights. The dark intimacy suggests we're getting glimpses of the lives we're unaware of as we might be walking across what appears to be a quiet, empty block. Angela Wendt, who designed the original's costumes, selects simpler, darker styles this time around.

Unlike predecessor Anthony Rapp, who played video artist Mark as a frenetic, post-modern hipster, Adam Chanler-Berat comes off as a sweet unassuming fellow who would easily blend into a crowd. He's styled to strike an obvious resemblance to Larson, and his project of documenting a year's worth of events among those around him parallels the composer/librettist's writing of Rent. The likeable naïveté Chanler-Berat brings to the role helps to show how unaware Mark is that his obsession with gathering material has cause him to become emotionally detached from his surroundings, as he keeps seeing those around him as subject matter. (Peter Nigrini's projections give us peeks at places and events Mark is seeing through his lens.)

Matt Shingledecker's babyfaced Roger, the HIV positive guitarist whose own obsession is to write one great song to leave to the world as proof that his life meant something, sports a wisp of a blond goatee; perhaps the character's unsuccessful attempt to be taken more seriously by looking older. Despite his very youthful appearance, Shingledecker effectively conveys a fatalistic attitude as Roger resigns himself to the inevitability of a short life. Arianda Fernandez sets off kinky sparks, wildly whipping her hair about as Mimi, the HIV positive fetish club dancer who lives life at full speed with the belief that there's "no day but today." Attracted to Roger, but unaccustomed to having a man not immediately lust after her, her gradual falling in love with him despite circumstances that that could forever keep them apart is touchingly played.

Also very touchingly played is the tragic relationship between cross-dressing street-drummer Angel (MJ Rodriguez) and street-wise academic Tom Collins (Nicholas Christopher). Rodriguez's Angel resembles an attention-craving club kid who might have stepped out of a production of Taboo and Christopher's smitten Collins is warm and protective.

Annaleigh Ashford is wonderfully funny as trust-fund bohemian Maureen, giving the Long Island girl a wide-eyed fascination for the misery and unrest surrounding her. In her hands, Maureen's protest monologue, "Over The Moon," is clearly not a spoof of performance artists, but rather a spoof of the character's misconception of performance art, as she awkwardly tries to control slide projections with her feet and incorporates moves that may have come out of suburban after-school ballet class. As her girlfriend, Joanne, Corbin Reid's frequent attitude is a conservative deadpan but the two of them bust out the tension of their love/hate relationship with a dynamic "Take Me Or Leave Me." Joanne and Mark also develop a bit of a bond in this production, perhaps sympathizing with each other as co-survivors of relationships with Maureen.

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Matt Shingledecker and Adam Chanler-Berat; Bottom: Arianda Fernandez.

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