Rent: Overrated or Revolutionary? — Page 3

Excellent points Urban. They echo an aritcle I read months ago in which a colleague and friend of Jonathan Larson's said the he feels that Jonathan was a great artist waiting to happen but that at the time of his premature death, he wasn't quite there.


It was a story about the tragedy of great potential lost, not great art achieved.

I think Rent was revolutionary in that it appealed to many people that weren't typical musical theater fans. You never walk into a performance of The Music Man and see kids with green mohawks and body piercings singing along with every word. It's like the gateway drug to theater addiction.

It can be considered overrated when people who don't know other theater say that it's the best show ever without having the knowledge/experience to back it up.

Kringas, I've always thought Susan Schulman is grasping at straws in many aspects of her argument. When I think of "heroic figures" in Rent, I think of Angel helping Collins after he's beat up, and Maureen and Johanne finding Mimi in the park and bringing her back to the loft. What's so heroic about Roger, Mark and Mimi that you think their efforts are so much greater than the others?

"It's constructed like a Benetton ad: There's the homeless Puerto Rican drag queen who's HIV-positive, the black upper-class lesbian, the straight white guy from the suburbs who's HIV-negative. And they're all presented as equal; they're all bohemians. This is a standard conceit of a dominant culture: to look at people who have different levels of social power and equalize them in a false way that removes the specificity of their experience."

She needs to meet my friends if she thinks diversity has to be contrived.

---

Updated On: 8/28/05 at 03:55 PM

Somehow, I think all these points are going to find their way into many critics' reviews.

"If somone made a movie musical of a show I consider to be artistically bad, I wouldn't see it simply out of principal. I couldn't care less for musicals as a whole if all of them became bad. By supporting a bad movie musical I am supporting bad art and thereby encouraging the musical PTB to create more shoddy art, since it's what the public seems to want. Supporting a bad musical for the sake of musicals everywhere is contradictory."

Well, of course there are variables to every situation, but overall I think what I say is valid. There are only so many musicals that haven't been made into movies that would have the possibility of being considered to be made into movies (Such as Miss Saigon, Les Miserables, Aida, Wicked, Hairspray, Sweeney Todd, etc). Most of them, I personally, wouldn't consider bad. It's not like if you support a not so good musical and it's successful someone is suddenly going to write all the music and the story for a sequel; at least it seems unlikely in most cases. Hollywood would probably just adapt other musicals, and by and large, hopefully they would be good ones. Every genre has bad movies, but at least musicals would be more at the forefront with more of a possibility of good ones being made if there was more of demand for them.

---

Updated On: 8/28/05 at 04:28 PM

You mean you're not excited at the prospect of a Grease 3? :-P

---

Or Annie 2. What was that sequel called? Daddy Warbucks?

yeah a classic piece of sh!t.
but i do <3 me some pfeiffer and "cool rider"

Nice avatar, Marquise.

---

Grease 2 is fuuuun.

---