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RENT Vox Populist
A decade ago, The play RENT exploded onto Broadway and musicals became hip again. Everywhere, it seemed, exhuberant RENT-heads were belting out, "Five-hundred twenty-fve thousand six-hundred minutes!" (That's how many there are in one year, according to the show's anthem, "Seasons of Love.")
The Pulitzer Prize winning RENT wasn't just a theater junkie obsession; college kids and thier moms were wearing out their cast albums too. Now with Oscar season upon us and 2002's smash Chicago having whetted the appetite for muscials at the multiplexes, the long-awaited film adaptation of RENT, to be released in November, is poised to be an even greater phenomenom than the play on which it's based.
A retelling of Pucinni's La Boheme, RENT is the story of twentysomethings struggling to make love and art amid the uncertainty and dissipation of youth. AIDS is the new consumption, and the grungy East Village of early-90's New York stands in for 1850's Paris. But the movie transcends its setting just as the play did, thanks to the universality of its "no day but today" theme of sex, drugs, and death.
RENT's power, laying bare to the truth that tragedy befalls even youth, is fueled by a sorrowful undercurrent: The show's 35-year-old composer Jonathan Larson, died suddenly the night before the play's first performance. It might seem odd that in Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Stepmom) the studio selected a man who'd never before directed a musical. But the early word is that Columbus & Co.---almost all of the original cast, including Jesse L. Martin, Taye Diggs, and Idina Menzel, along with newcomers Rosario Dawson and Tracie Thoms---have preserved RENT's giddy, gritty message: Whatever our struggles, our doubts and our fears, we are not alone--Rebecca Traister
For heaven's sake, don't try to be cynical. It's perfectly easy to be cynical.
~The Importance of Being Earnest~
