Yesterday marked the last performance of the original production of RENT.
Cue a plethora of headlines – 948,600 minutes of RENT; twelve seasons of love; the RENT is past due, taking out a new lease on the Nederlander; RENT can't pay the… well you know.
Like many of you, I adored RENT. And then I couldn't stand it. And then I learned to love it again. I memorized the La Vie Boheme litany when I had no idea who Sontag and Sondheim were, let alone Antonioni, Bertolluci, Kurosawa. (Bertolluci is the one with the free salad and breadsticks at lunch, right?) I haven't even listened to the soundtrack in years – don't need to, it's all still in my head, permanently imprinted with other unnecessary but irremovable information like X-Files episode titles and the first 50 places of pi.
There were other generation-defining rock musicals before RENT, and have been others since, but this one is ours. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to say our goodbyes.
For people of a certain age and inclination, the original Broadway cast album of RENT is indelibly wound up in the memories of middle school (or, if living more than an hour from Manhattan, high school). You knew every word of the score – five miso soup, four seaweed salad, three soy burger, two tofu dog platter, and a partridge in a pear tree. You filled bus trips with obnoxiously loud RENT shout-a-longs. The lyrics of No Day But Today adorned your agenda book, your cargo bag, your invitation to that one kid's Bar Mitzvah, and your profile for your first AOL screenname (MiMiLuv98 or ~RENT525600~). You probably didn't stand in line overnight to snag $20 front row seats on a biweekly basis, but that one girl from your high school did, and you would have joined her if you were cool enough and your parents allowed it.
And in the manner of adolescent fads, about a year after you discovered RENT you moved on, to Les Miz and Phantom and whatever show your school was doing that year, or perhaps to Aerosmith and 98 Degrees and the other favorites of the Z100 Morning Zoo, leaving RENT behind for the next class of 8th graders to discover.
Why did we love RENT so much? Surely we didn't identify with the characters. We were middle class white kids from the suburbs. They were, variably, HIV-positive queer minority druggies – but let's not forget that our p.o.v. character, Mark, was a straight Jewish boy from Scarsdale. They fought back against the encroaching front lines of East Village gentrification – we were just barely old enough to remember the death throes of old Times Square, to remember navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of 42nd street, the beggars and the garbage heaps.
The show itself was an instant period piece, dated the minute Larson set down his pen. The characters are hastily drawn – a stripper with a heart of gold, a drag queen with a heart of gold, a filmmaker with a heart of ice. The tacked-on happy ending is inauthentic and maudlin. A cynic could even trace the hype to the bottled lightning that accompanies a sudden and tragic death right before opening (see The Dark Knight, broken box office records of).
But it was also the first mainstream musical with queer principals that wasn't
about queerness. Everyone wanted to do
Take Me or Leave Me in the talent show with their best friend, and was surprised when the school objected because it's about lesbians. The characters may have been drag queens and coke fiends and performance artists, but all that meant was that they were outcasts, just like we were (what 8th grader isn't an outcast in some way?). And RENT is above all about outcasts building their own communities. About being an us, for once, instead of a them.
I don't think 7th graders are listening to RENT any more, not the way we did, but there are a number of other shows competing for their attention – courting those repeat audiences with rock songs and themes of social stigma and acceptance. Certainly
Wicked, highly enjoyable if rather bloated, occupies the old RENT niche these days, particularly among sullen-faced adolescent girls who are not especially populer(lar).
Spring Awakening draws fans with its excellent score and attractive production, though I shudder at the Very Special Episode book and the lyrics resembling the emo poetry of a
Wicked fan.
High School Musical likely belongs here as well, but because I still haven't seen it (I know, I know), you'll have to insert your own snarky dismissal here. Other current contenders include
Legally Blonde, whose composer might get it right on his next try, and the upcoming
Thirteen, about bar mitzvahs and indulging Jason Robert Brown's semi-pedophilia.
But I can judge these shows only as shows, and not as the catalysts of future middle school nostalgia – for me, that role was filled years ago.
The memory of RENT belongs to all of us former RENTheads, diverged as our paths and tastes may now be. We share the ghosts of lyrics half-remembered from another life, the astonishment at recit spoken as dialogue in the movie, the bond of singalongs and basement productions past. This family tree's got deep roots, and a little thing like a closing production can't touch them. We don't rent emotion – we own it.
Viva la vie boheme.
But it was also the first mainstream musical with queer principals that wasn't about queerness. Everyone wanted to do Take Me or Leave Me in the talent show with their best friend, and was surprised when the school objected because it's about lesbians. The characters may have been drag queens and coke fiends and performance artists, but all that meant was that they were outcasts, just like we were (what 8th grader isn't an outcast in some way?). And RENT is above all about outcasts building their own communities. About being an us, for once, instead of a them.
