What Would Puccini Do?
Long, long ago, on a continent far, far away, an exceedingly generous friend took your reviewer to see her first opera ever:
La bohème
at Covent Garden. Embarrassingly enough, though, as if referencing Julia Roberts in
Pretty Woman,
yours truly started bawling during "Che gelida manina" and barely slackened until Mimi keeled over in a flurry of coloratura. That torrent of emotion has become for me something of a standard regarding theatrical enterprises in which people burst into anguished song.
Rent
(loosely based on Puccini's opera), tragically, fails to pony up, more often eliciting guffaws and snorts than chills or tears.
***image1***Director Chris Columbus, who is after all responsible for the first two Harry Potter films,
Home Alone, Nine Months
and
Mrs. Doubtfire
, has essentially turned
Rent
into a kids' movie, the kind no one but your 13-year-old stagestruck daughter will want to see. For a musical whose original libretto once verged on the parental advisory, this
Rent
is awfully tame, reducing genderfuck to a couple of pretty outfits and rendering protest performance art so stunningly dull you're tempted to mount your own right there in the movie theater. Through the judicious application of some truly atrocious sound editing (in which blasts of amplified strings and electric guitars submerge the lyrics in an exuberant volume of nothingness) and really weird blocking (should the duet "I'll Cover You" really be tossed off as the ersatz lovers are strolling along a street?), this version even somehow manages to downplay the non-white, non-queer facets of its ensemble, which you'd find grudgingly impressive if it weren't so reprehensible.
Mark (Anthony Rapp) and Roger (Adam Pascal) are roommates, but the room in question is an abandoned East Village warehouse loft on which they haven't paid rent for a year-their sell-out friend-turned-landlord Benny (Taye Diggs) says he'll allow them to stay as long as they do him an unsavory favor. In the meantime Mark is shooting a documentary and Roger is trying to write songs-while also avoiding Mimi (new cast addition Rosario Dawson), a pretty junkie and exotic dancer who lives downstairs and has already taken a shine to Roger. Then there's their friend Tom (Jesse L Martin) and his drag-queen lover Angel (the irrepressible Wilson Jermaine Heredia, the best thing about both the original Broadway production and this pallid replica)-as well as Mark's promiscuous ex-girlfriend Maureen, who jilted him for Joanne (Tracie Thoms, another welcome newcomer). As if the constant threat of eviction and their complicated love lives weren't bad enough, four of the seven young artists are HIV positive (AIDS picking up where TB left off in Puccini as the retributive slayer of youth, health and beauty when it dares to live beyond the pale of suburbia). It'll all end in tears, you surmise-but not before everyone gets to sing and dance on top of restaurant tables, like the kids from
Fame
only older-and not without some cheap shots at tragedy.
***image2***
To the extent that
Rent
's successful at all, we can credit the insistent verve and commitment of its eight-person ensemble-all the more remarkable when you consider that half a dozen of them originated their roles, and they probably know exactly how long "five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes" feels when you've been saying the same lines since 1996. Though the film's exteriors take place in a New York nearly as improbable as that on
Friends
(eg, people on the subways beam delightedly at our dancing and singing heroes, instead of beating them to a frilly pulp), there's a brief goofy set piece in Santa Fe which will incite special hilarity in local viewers. But on the whole, as far as
Rent
goes, you probably should-wait for the DVD release, and then do just that.
