by They say you shouldn’t talk about the dead but there is no rule against criticizing their work. US composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson famously died of an aortic dissection the day before his musical Rent opened off-Broadway, and somehow the tragedy of his sudden death became the show’s reputation.
If he had survived, two things might have happened: the music might not have had such emotional resonance; and Larson’s talent might have found a stronger device to achieve it. Because, as much as people love it, Rent is pretty awful.
That’s not to say it doesn’t trumpet potential. Alternatively, you could imagine Larson was honing and honing his lyrical and compositional skills, embracing dramatic nuance and refining his melodic instincts. The two musicals he left behind – this and Tick, Tick … Boom!, which had an Australian revival starring Hugh Sheridan – show the way, but they are not great works in themselves. Larson seems forever haunted by a future that never materialized.
Rent is a fairly unsophisticated reimagining of Puccini’s La Bohème, which crosses the opera’s Parisian bohemians from the 1830s to lower Manhattan in the mid-90s. Larson combs everything with undergraduate enthusiasm but little sense of accuracy. So we get a mix of underdeveloped stories that touch on hot issues including homelessness, drug addiction and the AIDS crisis. Characters often seem like mere ciphers, their actions serving Larson’s dramatic whims but rarely making psychological sense.
Mark (Noah Mullins) lives with his friend Roger (Jerrod Smith) in a squalid hovel in the Lower East Side area of New York called Alphabet City. They suffered a power outage begrudgingly, freezing living conditions and, as something that probably should have been seen coming, demand to pay last year’s rent. They decide, in the title song, that they will simply refuse to pay, and will organize a protest movement against landlords, police and apartheid itself. Australian cities, which will experience their own rental crises, should take note.
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The plot – like many of the songs themselves – tends to lurch and splutter; just as one idea takes hold, Larson drops out and picks up another. For a while it looks like the story will follow the community-set-up-buildings trajectory favored by 80s cinema in the United States – of which Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo is undoubtedly the highlight. This turns into a tedious will they/won’t they love triangle and eventually into a death scene so schmaltzy that it wouldn’t look out of place in a landmark Christmas movie. Musical theater can get off on being daggy and manipulative but the intensity of Rent often feels like a parody of the form. No wonder it was so mercilessly set up in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police.
Larson’s relationship with tragedy, marginalization and victimization is more disturbing. Despite the fact that many of the characters in Rent have HIV, it is only the black trans Angel (played with vividness and wonder by Carl de Villa) who dies – a kind of sacrificial lamb of praise. One small but notable scene in which a homeless woman abandons Mark for filming; it is a reflection of Larson’s tendency to find human suffering suitable for his self-mutilation. But it goes nowhere and is never mentioned again. It reads less like a self-warning and more like a Freudian slip.
The show’s director, Shaun Rennie, continues his anarchic energy in a performance full of intense thought but little refinement. Performances are insignificant and many of the marginal features are hamma and ait. Ella Butler’s costumes are appropriately grim and inscrutable, and Dann Barber’s industrial set works well enough, but only Paul Jackson’s vivid design conveys the emotion and danger that made Lower Manhattan desolate and pre-gentrified.
Smith brings a powerful rock inflection to the evil Roger and Mullins starts well as the narrator and representative of the show’s audience, even if the role loses its ability in the second actor. Nick Afoa is excellent as Collins’ lover and philosopher, commanding the stage and creating a truly sexual bond with Angela De Villa. Martha Berhane throws her all into the role of Mimi, even though the book asks her to do some stupid things for love. But the other keys are thrown unevenly and largely ineffective.
Rent has a place in the musical theater canon. Familiar with social works such as Hair – the song list La Vie Bohème is particularly indebted to – it shows the rock music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, that is Jesus Christ Superstar. For better or worse, it influenced the entire decade of music that followed, from excellent stuff like Next to Normal to excrement like American Idiot. Rabid fans will happily ingest it, cheese and all. But in 2024, Larson’s saccharine view of bohemian life, and his tendency to rationalize and minimize the suffering of a generation devastated by AIDS, feels glib. This production does nothing to restore the reputation of the work, even as we wonder what it might be.
