Am I the only person who hated Rent? — Page 3

Here is the thing that confuses me.... i got the cd and LOVED IT....the i saw the show adn was sooooo thoroughly unimpressed .... so i am thinking that maybe it was the cast because i only liked a couple of people in it.....

maybethistime wrote:

"Aside from a few select songs, I cannot stand RENT at all. It sounds like an excuse for mediocre actors to scream at the top of their lungs."

Much like Patti Lupone did in "Evita"?!

I'm someone who lived in the East Village from 1991 to 2001. My friends were mostly actors, musicians, artists, performance artists, waiters, bartenders and students. I knew many of the drug dealers, drag queens, hustlers, prostitutes, homeless people and the folks that lived in the squats on 13th (by the way the squats were still around in the mid-90s, as were the crackhouses on 6th and 7th, Tompkins was closed and the urban renewal with the high priced condos hadn't quite started yet -- the East Village was still very bohemian and gritty with a thriving music and performance artist scene). A large percentage of all of the above were living with AIDS at the time, many of whom have died since (my friends and I spent literally hundred of hours during the 90s on the 14th floor of St. Vincent's -- the AIDS wing). In short, I intimately knew the world depicted in "Rent" -- better, I think, than Larson did.

I say that because I remember going to see "Rent" when it was still at New York Theatre Workshop with a large group of friends and one of the main reactions all of us had was how "suburban" a view of the East Village it was, as if it had been written by someone who'd only read about it and not really spent any time there (regardless of what the actual reality was, that's how "Rent" seemed to us). These self-consciously "edgy" noncomformists on stage reminded us of the trust fund babies who used to hang out on Avenue A pretending to be homeless and begging for change and only received ridicule from most of the real neighborhood denizens. The whole show was as if Disney had decided to come up with an Alphabet City theme park, or something.

The music was bland, dated middle-of-the-road pop and guitar rock -- the type that we all remembered from AM radio as kids in the 70s -- not at all reflective of the punk/alternative East Village music scene that was happening in the 80s and 90s that was heavily influenced by CBGBs (the Ramones, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, Talking Heads, and Blondie all came out of neighborhood clubs like CBs, Pyramid, Brownies, Mercury Lounge etc....). To our ears, "Rent" sounded like a lot of second-rate Elton John and Linda Rondstadt -- the stuff our parents liked; the kind of pop/rock music that people who don't really like REAL contemporary pop/rock music listened to.

[For a show that WAS embraced by the neighborhood and was truly reflective musically of the downtown scene (and the cast album ended up on every jukebox in every bar in the neighborhood -- "Rent" never made even one), check out "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" which began being developed over at Squeezebox in the Meatpacking district shortly after "Rent" opened on Broadway -- a weekly Friday night crosstown jaunt for East Villagers, who made up most of the crowd (John Mitchell and Steve Trask were regulars and I remember them trying out "Hedwig" material for the audience there).]

We'd known about "Rent" since its early workshops and had had friends in it at various times (neighborhood regular Blake Burba was the lighting designer and went with the show to Broadway; my friend Dee was the "Seasons of Love" soloist during the first workshop -- Grief told me he replaced her because she looked just too young for the role). So we all went prepared to love it. We didn't. The book was a mess, the staging amateurish and with the exception of one or two numbers, the music unimpressive. The final straw was "La Vie Boheme." Witnessing life in the East Village reduced down to a corny, lame jingle that sounded like something out of a soft drink commercial was just too much for most of the people I was with. At intermission, a half dozen friends of mine, having held it in out of respect for the actors, collectively burst out laughing at what they had just seen and decided to flee the theatre, never to return.

I stayed for Act II (Act One had been a mess, but there was a song or two that I thought worked and wanted to see what happened). Again, for the second act, I thought a couple of songs worked and/or showed promise, but it struck me that the whole thing needed another draft or two. And then, there was that appalling finale where Mimi awakes from the dead or whatever which I and the couple of people left in the audience whom I knew found incredibly offensive. Having lost dozens of friends in just a few years to AIDS, we knew all too well that that just doesn't ever happen. That ending was cheap, a cop-out and an insult to all those truly suffering with the disesase.

I went back and the show again shortly before it opened on Broadway (thanks to a comp from a friend in the production) and had more or less the same reaction. I don't hate the show, but think that only about half of it works. Unfortunately, Larson's not around to fix it, so I'll always have a very lukewarm feeling about it.

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Updated On: 4/18/05 at 05:35 PM

Off the top of my head -- it's been YEARS since I've listened to it -- I thought that "Will I?" and "Take Me or Leave Me" were very effective. I'd have to listen to the cast album to remember others.

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Margo, your post made me cry

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"You can "get" what the show is trying to do and still think it doesn't do a very good job of it."

I never said that you couldn't. I know people who do. But those people would never reduce the show to "an excuse" for untalented people to scream at each other.

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Updated On: 4/17/05 at 06:40 PM