‘Rent’ turns into a racket at the Hobby Center
The cast of the 20th-anniversary tour of “Rent,” at the Hobby Center through Sunday, proved to be a terrific ensemble of young vocal powerhouses, who rose up to the challenge of doing justice to the classic musical.
Now, it’s hard to pinpoint when “Rent” became a classic, or when its portrayal of bohemia in the East Village became so “period,” so foreign to Manhattan today. But it’s impossible to deny how wonderfully yet strangely Jonathan Larson’s magnum opus has aged in two decades. The music is still a delightful symphony of noise, emotion and angst, barraging you with unrelenting sound for two hours. The story is still heartbreaking and lush. The characters still feel so very much alive.
Too bad, then, that the musical was effectively sabotaged by the Hobby Center’s failure of a sound system during its Tuesday performance. You could tell, if you tried, that the performers — which included a sparkling Aiyana Smash as Mimi and an infectious Kelsee Sweigard as Maureen — were hitting every note just right. But their voices, when poorly balanced with the electric guitar, piano and drums, came out fuzzy and muted. Their words, so important and many in Larson’s high-speed script, turned into electronic mush.
This is not the first time the Hobby Center’s sound failed a production that deserved better. The only moment of aural clarity came in the first few minutes of Act 2, when the company sang the unforgettable “Seasons of Love.” Perhaps the singers broke through because they didn’t have to sing over the band, or perhaps the choral nature of the piece masked the mushiness of the individual mics. Either way, the crispness of “Seasons of Love” only highlighted how low-grade the rest of the evening sounded.
First-timers will be likely confused, then, by Larson’s mishmash of various plotlines. The musical is about a group of friends and lovers who are squatting in a warehouse in a grungy neighborhood filled with starving artists, drag queens, gay refugees and the homeless. Hanging over the story’s focus on relationships is the specter of death in the era of pre-“cocktail” HIV. But I was drawing from memory in an attempt to follow the plot since many of the words — despite the excellent projection and enunciation from the cast — were unintelligible.
Putting the sound issue aside, the defiance showcased in “Rent” may seem passé or even tonedeaf to a younger generation of viewers, who may shrug at some of these “homeless-by-choice” hipsters ignoring phone calls from their parents and refusing to pay their rent.
“To hand-crafted beers made in local breweries,” the cast sings in “La Vie Boheme.” “To yoga, to yogurt, to rice and beans and cheese.” These lyrics have taken on an unintentional irony in the age of gentrification.
But “Rent” is still a startling chronicle of the AIDS crisis, and the nuance and empathy given to Angel (a standout Joshua Tavares) — a transgender (or perhaps, more accurately, gender-fluid) HIV+ performer — remains a narrative achievement.
Larson could not have predicted that his bohemia would be so quickly co-opted by the uberrich. I argue, then, that the appeal of “Rent” hasn’t diminished but rather changed. Nothing quite like “Rent” existed before its opening in 1994. Nothing, at least, that embraced queerness and rock and anti-establishment lifestyle the way it did while being a major blockbuster. Even if “Hair” begat “Rent,” so did “Rent” pave the way for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “Spring Awakening,” “Next to Normal” and so on.
No, in the era of post-privacy social media, gun violence, xenophobia and anti-vaxxers, “Rent” is not exactly on-message. It is, however, a fascinating document of the AIDS crisis and 1990s youth anguish, not to mention a treasure trove of hummable harmonies. You don’t need nostalgia to find pleasure in it. Just a lively cast, a solid band and — I hope it’s the last time I say it — a good, working sound system.