“Rent,” which won the 1996 Tony Award for Best Musical, made a dramatic splash when it first reached Chicago three years ago, as Richard Christiansen noted in his review. It returns to Chicago at the Rosemont Theatre Friday, Oct. 6, and runs through Sunday, Oct. 8 (call 312-902-1500) (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
“Rent,” in the production we’re seeing here at the Shubert Theatre, resoundingly justifies every bit of attention that has been lavished on this phenomenal musical.
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It’s not that the show is unique.
Its use of an electronically amplified rock score has its immediate and obvious predecessors in “Hair” (1967) and “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1971), with perhaps a bit of its playfulness and outrageousness picked up from “The Rocky Horror Show.” And in story and characters, of course, it owes its deepest debt to Giacomo Puccini’s “La Boheme.”
Nor is this a musical without flaws. In its outpouring of music, the ardent sometimes becomes the strident; and it has some major structural problems in its second act.
Some of these problems may have been inevitable. A few might at least have been eased if the musical’s principal creator, librettist-lyricist-composer Jonathan Larson, had not died shortly after the musical’s final dress rehearsal in January 1996.
Yet the essential source of the musical’s appeal, the passion that infuses Larson’s vision of his outsider artist friends in New York’s East Village, is never absent; and the production, which has grown in size and power (and ticket price) since its debut at the relatively small New York Theatre Workshop, has significantly added to the show’s strengths.
The musical’s central conceit, that of transposing the starving Bohemians of Puccini’s late 19th Century Paris to the anti-establishment young artists of the East Village, is a natural for a contemporary rock musical.
The deadly scourge that afflicts the story’s alienated youths is not tuberculosis, but AIDS; and Mimi, Roger’s fragile love, has the added burden of being a narcotics addict.
These terrors of the ’90s are coupled with the eternal struggles of young people coming of age: an intense concern with sex; a defiant attitude toward all matters considered conservative and money-grubbing; a willingness to freely experiment in both art and lifestyle; and, above all, a totally fervent (and false) belief that, as one of the musical’s songs puts it, “there is only us, there is only this,” there is only here and now.