Miami Herald - November 23, 2005
Christine Dolen, cdolen@herald.com

But will the uninitiated turn out? And if they do, what will they make of characters who dodge traffic on a bike or dance on the subway, who cope with being HIV positive or with losing the ones they love, who embrace connection or run from it, all while singing Larson's rocking, plaintive, tender score?

Rent, which is closing in on a gross of half-a-billion dollars since it was born as a simple Off-Broadway musical almost 10 years ago, is a show beloved by its many hard-core fans, aka Rentheads. They should love the risk director Chris Columbus took in making a film so faithful to the original, and in the decision to let six of the eight original stars re-create their roles instead of handing the characters off to younger movie and rock superstars.

But Columbus' choices were risky, and how well this $40 million movie will do at the multiplex remains to be seen.

Unlike Chicago, the smash that helped revive the movie musical as a viable art form, Rent hasn't been reimagined so that its characters' singing is "justified" as fantasy or a performance. In Larson's world, people flirt, grieve, battle and transcend through song. If you can get past that convention and surrender to the La Bohme-inspired story, you'll get what the Rentheads love about it.

Columbus references the stage roots of Rent in the movie's opening, having the principal characters lined up onstage in an empty theater to sing Seasons of Love, that joyous anthem to making the 525,600 minutes in a year about savoring the lives and the love of friends.

Then the movie opens up, taking us to the gritty Lower East Side loft where two roommates, rock musician Roger (Adam Pascal) and filmmaker Mark (Anthony Rapp), struggle to make meaningful art as they cope with poverty, the loss of love and friends who are (as Roger is) living with HIV or dying of AIDS.

Their extended "family" includes a philosophy professor, Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin, now of TV's Law & Order), and his new street-musician beau, a radiant transvestite named Angel (Tony Award winner Wilson Jermaine Heredia); Mark's ex, a bisexual performance artist named Maureen (Idina Menzel, who won her own Tony for Wicked), and her lawyer-girlfriend Joanne (Tracie Thoms); Mark and Roger's manipulative landlord (and former pal) Benny (Taye Diggs, the hunk from How Stella Got Her Groove Back); and the lithe, beautiful Mimi (Rosario Dawson), an S&M club dancer who lives downstairs, a 19-year-old who is into heroin and into Roger.

Some of the movie-elaborate scenes, such as Maureen's hilarious performance "protest" piece Over the Moon and the exploration of Mark and Joanne's exasperated rivalry in Tango: Maureen, enhance the storytelling. Others, like an elaborate commitment ceremony scene for Maureen and Joanne or Roger's decamping to scenic Santa Fe, feel like filler.

The things that paid off so powerfully onstage do so again in the movie: Mimi's sexy, playful deviousness as she sings Light My Candle to Roger; Collins' transformation of the joyous I'll Cover You into a song of mourning; Roger's passionate Your Eyes, sung to Mimi as she seems near death.

What is also most wonderful about the movie is the chance to hear Pascal, Diggs, Menzel, Heredia, Rapp and Martin sing Larson's music again, to know that these performances will be forever preserved in a way that ephemeral theater is not. It's sad that Daphne Rubin-Vega, the original Mimi, and Fredi Walker, the first Joanne, weren't part of this re-creation. But Dawson, with her movie cred, and Thoms mesh well with the original actors.

Those originals are (though they don't look it) 10 years older, of course, as is Rent itself. Our post-9/11 world is different from the one that Larson, who died suddenly from an aortic aneurysm before his show's first preview, explored in his best and final musical. But the show's themes -- acceptance of others, striving for authenticity, living in the moment, finding family -- are still abundantly relevant. And it is thrilling to hear those messages delivered by actors who have lived with them for so long.

051123
MH051104

AEGiS presents published material, reprinted with permission and neither endorses nor opposes any material. All information contained on this website, including information relating to health conditions, products, and treatments, is for informational purposes only. It is often presented in summary or aggregate form. It is not meant to be a substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professionals. Always discuss treatment options with a doctor who specializes in treating HIV.

Copyright ©1980, 2005. AEGiS. All materials appearing on AEGiS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of AEGiS, or the party credited as the provider of the content. .