Content provided in partnership with
Rent gets real: as the pansexual, AIDS-inflected Broadway sensation becomes a gritty, hyperreal movie, three returning cast members talk about how the show's messages of love, life, and liberty for all have only become more urgent
Advocate, The, Nov 8, 2005 by Michael Giltz
"East Village. Rock opera. AIDS. It could be the ultimate Cheez Whiz, or it could be something interesting," recalls Anthony Rapp of his first peek at a synopsis of an unproduced stage musical called Rent. He was standing in an obscure of agency, but after a good run on the New York stage and playing teen roles in several films, including Dazed and Confused, he was about as far from the top of the heap as an ICM client could get.
"It was September of 1994. I was working at Starbucks--the first time I'd had to take a survival job in New York. There was a guy [at ICM] who got upgraded from an assistant to an agent's job. I saw the Rent breakdowns on his desk. It was a three-week workshop, and [gay stage director] Michael Greif was directing it, and I knew who he was." Rapp talked his way into an audition.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
Meanwhile, would-be rock and roller Idina Menzel was between gigs as a wedding singer when she heard about the show and thought it sounded like fun. And the timing was perfect: Rent was going to be workshopped in January and February. There aren't a lot of weddings in the dead of winter. "I was just happy to be doing theater," says Menzel. "It was my first professional [acting] job." It turned out to be much more. "That New Year's Eve at the Four Seasons in Philly was the last wedding gig I ever did."
Actor Wilson Jermaine Heredia was not interested in auditioning for some workshop production of a rock opera inspired by Puccini's La Boheme. "It was downtown, it was only going to last a month, and I'd just got medical insurance," he recalls. "I was working full-time as a dispatcher for a realty company, midnight to 9 in the morning. They owned all these buildings and had their own maintenance crew. If there was a leak at 2 in the morning, I was the person they'd call." Sending out plumbers was a secure gig. Singing and dancing in a musical about AIDS? Heredia recalls thinking, You know what? I can't afford that.
But the power of Rent won him over: WV-hen I got the music and the script, I got nervous because I loved the project so much." He auditioned and was offered the pivotal role of Angel, a mischievous drag queen with AIDS and a great sense of rhythm. But he dithered, still worried about quitting his job. "My manager called me up and was intimated with me. He said, 'Listen, are you a dispatcher? Or are you an actor?'" Heredia says.
That question woke him up. And soon afterward, Rent woke up Broadway and the world. Created by a long-struggling writer-composer named Jonathan Larson, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics, it brought onto the mainstream stage the world of the lower east side in New York City--a universe populated with homeless people, drug addicts, aspiring performers, drag queens, and would-be filmmakers living on the streets or in dodgy lofts with no heat. In short, outcasts. But outcasts who had found their own sense of family, their own idea of home.
In Larson's vision, the La Boheme characters were transformed into young New Yorkers, struggling artists, gay and straight [see sidebar]. Rapp played Mark, the filmmaker and narrator whose ex-girlfriend, Maureen (Menzel)--an amusing gloss on Laurie Anderson--style performance artists--is now dating Joanne, a smart, driven career woman. Mark lives in an illegal sublet with Roger (Adam Pascal), an HIV-positive rock musician and recovering addict who falls hard for Mimi, the drug-addicted stripper who lives downstairs. Mimi is also dating the landlord, Benny (Taye Diggs), Mark's and Roger's one-time friend turned real estate mogul. Meanwhile another pal, computer hacker Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin), meets and falls for Angel, a sweet presence who finds his true love just as the closing credits of his fabulous life are beginning to play.
The music--more than two hours of it--wove their stories into Larson's down-and-out tapestry, which also included a chorus of homeless folks and an HIV support group. Even as demos, songs like "I'll Cover You" (a heartbreaking same-sex love song), "La Vie Boh6me," and "Seasons of Love" marked a major talent, redefining what a musical could be. Larson had turned New York's supposedly seamy side into a celebration of life and love, and Rent turned New York on its head, packing successively bigger theaters en route to Broadway, a fistful of Tony Awards, and the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Rent was never just a hit musical. Rent mattered. It amplified the urgent desperation of the late '80s and early '90s, when AIDS was rampant, no one seemed to care, and people struggled to get by. It took place and was first per formed long before dings like the protease inhibitor cocktail would lull people into a false sense of complacency about this plague. It put queers and drug addicts and people with AIDS at the heart of a big-hearted musical. This wasn't Cheez Whiz: Rent spoke to audiences worldwide with the emotional appeal of, say, Les Miserables or The Lion King, but it wasn't a noble fantasy of long ago or far away. This show celebrated the lives of the very people audiences stepped over outside as they made their way into Broadway venues.
