A Singular Triumph
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Theater A Singular Triumph By John Podhoretz The American theater generally, and the New York theater specifically, do not play much of a role in the cultural life of the nation. It was not ever...
...Lesbians are wonderful...
...The show opens to the best reviews any musical has received in a decade...
...The New York Times, always excited by a piece of theater dealing with AIDS, begins its coverage...
...That signals other media that something big is about to happen...
...They have all found a connection and formed a new "family...
...Everything is back the way it was...
...Now, however, the theater has not only a new sensation on its hands, but a full-blown theatrical tragedy as well...
...Rounding out the circle are a saintly drag queen named Angel and his boyfriend, a computer genius who rips off ATMs...
...Larson indulges in every leftoid clich...
...That is what happened to Passion and Angels in America, the last two such sensations...
...They fall in love...
...A theatrical legend is born, as of old, blossoming like the flowers on a grave...
...known to man: The homeless are wonderful...
...The theater is irrelevant again...
...Rent is one of the few musicals to be written from beginning to end by one man...
...They are about to be kicked out by their old roommate Ben, a boho-turned-yuppie who wants to gentrify the neighborhood by throwing them out and clearing the tent city...
...In summary, Rent is yet another tired, diversity-crazed, radical-chic PC.-fest...
...Paying no rent is wonderful...
...Who will die...
...The latest example is Nathan Lane, who has been burning up the New York boards for a decade...
...Lovely songs like "Santa Fe" and "Seasons of Love" and old-fashioned show-stoppers like "Take Me or Leave Me" and "Out Tonight" represent a restoration of sorts-the return of tunefulness to the musical theater after decades of dissonance and pastiche, courtesy of Stephen Sondheim...
...So the theater has managed to conjure up a sensation-a sensation that is, for once, well deserved...
...Two heterosexuals-a struggling filmmaker named Mark and an ex-junkie musician named Roger-are squatting in an abandoned building next to a homeless tent city...
...No, not of AIDS, as everybody initially suspected...
...Like Rent, these are two singular and original shows whose creators did nothing of consequence before or after...
...No longer...
...Plans are made to move it to Broadway, and Larson's father tours the possible theaters with a heavy heart...
...I doubt it...
...Larson has triumphed, but he is dead...
...Every year or two in the course of the past decade, a new play or musical has excited the attention of the theatrical community to such an extent that it bids fair to become a cultural phenomenon...
...Where once Broadway boasted of Mary Martin and Ethel Merman, Alfred Drake and John Raitt, Katharine Cornell and Laurette Taylor-larger-than-life performers who were considered somehow higher and more noble than the common run of Hollywood performer, and who made only occasional forays into the movies or television-now a Broadway performer only becomes a star when the movies or television anoints him as such...
...The cast weeps...
...He is the victim of a freak aortic aneurysm...
...Yuppies are monsters, and America should sink into the ocean...
...Then, tragedy...
...As recently as 30 years ago, Broadway was still a world unto itself, with its own stars, its own glamor, its own legends and tall tales, its own rich people willing to put up money to finance shows just so they could bask in the reflected glow...
...Rent wins the Pulitzer prize for drama a few weeks later, a bittersweet experience, Greif tells the New York Times, because Larson isn't there to enjoy it...
...Would Larson have proved a major creative force in the theater had he lived...
...The show closes in a year, having just made back its investment or lost a little money...
...A rave Times review is followed by a page in Newsweek, and by the inevitable profiles of the creative team in the Times itself and then in People and Us and on television's Entertainment Tonight...
...But with a starring performance in The Birdcage under his belt, Lane has suddenly become a box-office draw and receives an automatic standing ovation when he first steps on stage in the new Broadway revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum...
...Rent has the feel of a life's work, as though Larson poured everything he had into it-every tune and lyric he ever scribbled down...
...Drag queens are wonderful...
...Will love prevail, and between whom...
...At least four of these people have AIDS...
...What it needs is what it used to have, and what the movies, television, and pop music possess in abundance: glamor, mystery, controversy, and high drama...
...Who will live...
...It was not ever thus...
...Maureen stages a performance-art protest on the tent-city site...
...A month before Rent is to open at an off-off-Broadway theater, Larson dies at the age of 35...
...The director, Michael Greif, vows to go on...
...The answer is that they will probably love it, because against all odds, Rent is a very impressive, even dazzling, piece of theater...
...Viva la vie boh?me," the cast chants just before intermission...
...Mark's sexy former girlfriend Maureen has gone lesbian and is living with a Legal Aid lawyer named Joanne...
...What a story it is: A struggling artist named Jonathan Larson works for six years on Rent, a rock-opera version of La Boh?me about modern-day bohemians who live (and squat) among the homeless and the drug-addicted in and around the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side...
...What's more, the show has five memorable songs that you find yourself humming days afterward-though it is distasteful to report that the first really good love song written for the theater in years, called "I'll Cover You," is sung by two men, one of them in a wig and stockings...
...it turns out Larson may have been the first heterosexual to have a show staged in recent theatrical history...
...Larson was a genuinely talented man, and Rent is bursting with clever lyrics, funny ideas, and even a hilarious five-minute parody of performance art that is worth the price of admission alone...
...A multimedia frenzy sets in for about a month, and then-nothing...
...Roger meets Mimi, a teenage druggie who is also the yuppie's mistress...
...The theater isn't allowing itself to descend into cultural irrelevancy without a fight...
...It begins on Christmas eve...
...The homeless riot, thus disproving the yuppie's contention that bohemia is dead...
...Among its predecessors are Meredith Willson's The Music Man and Lionel Bart's Oliver...
...Rent is nominally a "rock opera," and the show it has most frequently been compared to is the 1960s hippiefest Hair...
...Larson writes it all, book and music and lyrics...
...Who will sell out?-for, as one song goes, "when you live in America at the end of the millennium, you are what you own...
...The buzz starts a few months before the show's opening with intense coverage by the New York Times, the only news organ that matters when it comes to theater...
...Rent cannot in itself breathe life into a moribund institution, but the late Jonathan Larson has given Broadway a bit of a pulse, however faint that pulse might be...
...Junkies are wonderful...
...There are huge bidding wars for the movie and cast-album rights...
...But Hair didn't have a tenth of the life Rent has, and in any case the term "rock opera" is ill-chosen-with different orchestrations, some of these numbers could have been the work of Richard Rodgers...
...This may thrill the New York Times arts staff and the theatergoing community of New York-now made up almost entirely of Jews from the suburbs and gay men from Manhattan-but what will the Cats tourist crowd make of such shenanigans...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 33
