Rent comes up short

The New York Times once dubbed Rent as a “landmark rock opera” and other American magazines and newspapers such as Rolling Stone and Variety have been equally effusive.

The wave of media hype continues today even though the AIDS hysteria of the 1990s has all but disappeared, consequently lessening the shock of marginalized New York artists living with disease and homelessness.

When you witness Edmonton’s latest rendition of Rent> performed by Two One-Way Tickets to Broadway, you want to be hit in the gut and thrown off-balance before reaching a cathartic moment where you are completely transformed.

Unfortunately, that moment never happens. Perhaps its because the intensity of this show was fuelled by the sensibilities of a different era.

However, this Martin Galba-directed, three-hour production packs a powerful pace, reaches a high decibel range, throbs with energy and represents a past era’s spirited rebellion.

Jonathan Larson, a bohemian artist living in Manhattan, was the librettist/composer of this opera and he wrote about his peers. Tragically, he had an aortic aneurysm the night before Rent’s last dress rehearsal in January 1996 and died.

Building on Hair, the hippie movement’s most successful work, Larson borrowed a plot from Puccini’s most successful opera La Boheme. The Puccini prototype has half a dozen struggling artists holed up as squatters in the East Village.

Roger (George Krissa) and Mark (Adam Mazerolle-Kuss) share a tiny apartment. Roger is a musical wannabe who shut down emotionally after his girlfriend committed suicide. The only person able to reach him is Mimi (Alix Ryan-Wong), a kittenish, heroin-addicted S&M performer.

Mark, an aspiring moviemaker, has been dumped by his performance-artist girlfriend Maureen (Nicole English) for a lesbian partner Joanne (Brittany Taylor). And Tom Collins (Tyler Smith), a radical computer buff falls for Angel (Tyler Pinsent), a frisky drag-queen who unfortunately expires from AIDS.

It’s a play about New York’s counter-culture of the ‘90s with just enough anti-establishment attitude, AIDS, drugs and homelessness to give it a morbid feel.

As a lesbian performance artist, English puts on an over-the-top act and St. Albert’s Lexy Strumecki displays one heck of a set of pipes singing the opera’s anthem Seasons of Love.

But the real scene-stealers are Smith and Pinsent as Tom Collins and Angel, two men completely immersed in a sensitive, but doomed love affair. Angel in particular, a fashion guru who outfits herself in garish boas, fishnet stockings and ballet tutus, has no inhibitions and utterly charms the audience.

My major quibble is that the non-stop music was often too loud, drowning out the vocals. The storyline is told completely through song and when the lyrics are drowned out, the audience loses critical information.

This is not a bad production, nor is it a great one. But it will make you pause and think and that is what theatre is supposed to do.