RENT

I saw Rent at The Muny this past weekend.

I don’t find the show to be aging well. In conversations with others this week, I am finding general agreement with some of my thoughts on “why” the show doesn’t work as well as some other shows.

Rent is very much a product of a certain age and place. Others may disagree (and I know many folks who found the show to be moving and powerful), but what seemed revelatory in the last 1990s just seems to me to be a bit much, and in need of an editor, and specific, tied to the days when AZT was changing expectations for AIDS patients. And tied to a location and culture that is far outside my own experience.

Many other shows I like, even love, are also tied to a specific location or culture that is not part of me, but I love them anyhow. So what’s really bugging me about Rent?

Maybe it’s that it’s a rock musical, and that’s just not my happy place.

But also, I don’t find the show to be timeless and universal in a way that even something like Little Shop is, let alone Hello, Dolly! or even The Drowsy Chaperone, not to mention the greats of the Golden Age like Guys and Dolls, The Music Man, or She Loves Me.

Part of the problem with Rent is that it’s been subsumed by mythology. This is what happens when a new-voice bright-light composer/lyricist dies on the eve of the show’s triumphant premiere.

Imagine my surprise when the New York Times voiced — better than I ever could — many of these sentiments, and others with which I am in agreement, in a review this week! —

“But what about tragedy? For the sake of argument, let’s call “Rent” a tragedy even though it does everything in its considerable power to turn the nightmare of AIDS in the late 1980s, recalling parallel plagues in its 19th-century sources, into musical theater uplift. And time has further distorted it. In the manner of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in their time, the show’s big anthem, “Seasons of Love,” has now delaminated from its story entirely. Instead of a plea to treasure brief lives, it has become an all-purpose good-times chorale; my sons (today in their late 20s) sang it at their elementary school graduations.

“An author should be so lucky as to have that problem, but it nevertheless is a problem. So is the meta-tragedy surrounding “Rent,” whose author, Jonathan Larson, died at 35 in the hours just before the show’s scheduled premiere. The work has essentially been frozen as he left it that day in 1996. Thom Allison, who directed Stratford’s production, told me that permission for even the tiniest change in the script, to correct an acknowledged inconsistency, was denied by the estate’s representatives.

“That leaves new generations little wiggle room in which to experiment with refreshing “Rent” and finessing its headaches. As always, it struck me in the Stratford production that the work of the downtown artists the show means to valorize is actually terrible; that the central male character is utterly passive; that its credibility as history is all but shattered by the last-minute resurrection of a character we’ve just watched succumb to AIDS. Having seen “Spamalot” the night before, I was surprised she didn’t sing “I’m Not Dead Yet” as she awoke.

“Yet Allison’s staging at Stratford’s flagship Festival Theater, also home this season to “Much Ado About Nothing” and “King Lear,” made a pretty good case that, in its scale at least, “Rent” can hold its own in such company. Certainly the story of the drag queen Angel and her lover Tom Collins (traced in the songs “Today 4 U,” “I’ll Cover You” and “Santa Fe”) has a full arc and tragic grandeur, enhanced here by frankness. The sight of Angel, beneath her drag, covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions from neck to ankle (thanks to a cleverly made body suit) sent me reeling back to 1989.

“The question is whether “Rent” can be meaningful even for those unable to be reeled back that way. The Stratford production makes the case that it can, but however much the appearance of a new section of the AIDS quilt during the finale moved me, I wondered how many people under 40 even knew what it was. Some shows are so of their moment that they cannot be wholly of ours.”

Some shows are so of their moment that they cannot be wholly of ours. That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking all week.

None of this negates the classiness of the Muny’s staging, the power of those voices, the thrill of seeing this particular musical revived so lavishly. The Muny did the show proud.

But for me, it’s a hard show to truly like.