RENEGADE ARTS’ RENT FINDS STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
As musicals go, no title would seem more topical at this moment in our local history than Jonathan Larson’s Rent, unless the show were retitled Buy or Rent.
Set in New York’s East Village during the AIDS crisis of the 1990s, Rent focuses on a community of young people living hand to mouth, trying to find love, make art and their rent while the vacant lot next door gets developed for condos.
The producing company, Renegade Arts, is staging the show in its Shop Theatre, reopened in an industrial park at East Broadway and Renfrew because its previous rental at 2nd and Main was demolished for redevelopment.
But Rent aspires to more than just socio-economics. Adapted from Giacomo Puccini’s La boheme, it deals in high operatic emotion filtered through Larson’s contemporary rock score and vernacular libretto in three dozen musical numbers. An ambitious project in any circumstance, Dawn Ewen’s production meets its challenges only halfway.
The central characters, wannabe filmmaker Mark (Pete MacLeod) and his frustrated songwriter roommate Roger (Ian Crowe), are threatened with eviction by their old friend turned capitalist landlord Benny (Simon Paterson). Roger falls in love with Mimi (Imelda Wan), an exotic dancer/junkie. Mark’s exgirlfriend, performance artist and political protester Maureen (Jennifer Pielak), has a new squeeze, lawyer Joanne (Vanessa Merenda). Mark and Roger’s professor friend Collins (Colton Fyfe) and cross-dressing street-kid Angel (Jaxon Jensen) become a passionate couple. Appropriately, the show’s best song is Seasons of Love.
Told almost entirely in song, the story gets pretty fuzzy in this telling. The redevelopment plot loses focus, and although major characters are HIV-positive, the AIDS scenario hardly registers until the end. This results partly from the staging in The Shop’s large, lowrent studio. The actors are often at a distance from the audience, singing without microphones over Clare Wyatt’s amplified fourpiece band, so we lose details.
In contrast, the comic relief voicemails from mothers and others spoken without musical accompaniment are as clear as can be.
What emerges most clearly are the rocky relationships. The strongest is Collins’ and Angel’s. The latter character lives up to his name in Jensen’s quietly showy, dreamily otherworldly performance. Joanne and Maureen are on-again off-again, with Merenda’s solid Joanne a nice foil to Pielak’s volatile Maureen, whose wild solo showstopper Over the Moon had the audience mooing along with her.
This is the third Rent I’ve seen, and the Roger-Mimi plot has never worked for me. I find their relationship annoying, and their songs about each other undistinguished. They sing best about their own experiences — Roger’s One Song Glory done effectively by Crowe, and Wan’s sexy Mimi howling Out Tonight (“ou-ooo-t”) like a werewolf in London.
Among the best things in the show are the full choral numbers — Another Day, Will I, Seasons of Love — when the 15 voices in the ensemble merge and harmonize in celebration of the community’s strength and resilience. It’s a community without real bad guys except for an anonymous drug dealer. Even the would-be villain, landlord Benny (sung beautifully by Paterson), is redeemed at the end.
Rent is Renegade Arts’ third production after Hair and The Who’s Tommy. The company and its modest new venue are nice additions to Vancouver’s booming musical theatre scene. Let’s hope they’re able to keep making their rent.