San Francisco Chronicle
March 11, 1999

He's an HIV-positive songwriter. She's a junkie and an exotic dancer. Roger and Mimi -- the poster couple for love in the '90s.

Now forget all the voice-of-a-generation emblems plastered on "Rent'' by hype and the show's storied reputation. Tuesday's opening of Jonathan Larson's Pulitzer Prize- winner at the Golden Gate Theatre was an event. Not because the audience was programmed to respond but because the show connected with such power. This is the rare road show, some weaker links in the cast notwithstanding, that improves on its original Broadway incarnation.

The rock musical about life on New York's artistic and economic margins is based on Puccini's opera ``La Boheme,'' a tale of love and art among the down-and- out. Here the romances and spats are backlit by AIDS and homelessness, drugs and hardball real-estate.

Larson's '90s time-capsule book sends up performance art and the art of selling out. His ardent songs celebrate an exultant ``La Vie Bo heme'' and reverent ``Seasons of Love.'' The writer-composer spent his expansive gifts on the show, then died, at age 35, before he witnessed them in front of an audience.

``Rent'' penetrates to the heart of its subject -- the artists, addicts and deal makers on the Lower East Side -- to deliver a story and score that transcend documentary realism and its own sloganeering. It's impassioned, funny, gawky, moving, bleak, lyrical, stubborn and bursting with capital-R Romantic feeling. It's a lot like being young, in other words, which is the show's real and heart-wrenching theme.

Already a Broadway landmark, ``Rent'' arrives at the Golden Gate in a fresh shower of glory. The new company that's assembled here, featuring Broadway original Daphne Rubin-Vega as a tragic and defiant Mimi and unfurling a great banner of talent around her, is first-rate. So are the musical and production values in director Michael Greif's neo- Brechtian, bare walls-and-exposed scaffold production.

In the three years since ``Rent'' opened on Broadway, Greif, lighting designer Blake Burba and others have reworked and refined their contributions. Time has helped, too, in reducing the enormous shadow Larson's death imposed. He died of an aortic aneurysm in 1996, just before the show began previews off- Broadway. ``Rent'' was a legend before it opened.

Now, when a shaft of light throws Roger's shadow on the theater's back wall, it's the characters and their interwoven stories that com mand full attention.

Roger, played by a surly and magnetic Dean Balkwill, is struggling to compose one last song before he succumbs to AIDS; the murmurous ``One Song Glory'' depicts his quest. His roommate, Mark (the wry Trey Ellett), is making a film about their fluid and precarious life.

Their onetime roommate Benny (Brian M. Love), now a hip real estate mogul, wants to evict them and a homeless camp in the lot next door. Another friend, the sometimes teacher and ATM guerrilla Tom Collins (Mark LeRoy Jackson), has just been mugged and befriended by a drag queen named Angel (a delicate and striking Shaun Earl).

Mimi stops by during a power outage to get her candle lit, and Roger lights up in her presence. Mark's ex-lover Maureen (the hilarious Erin Keaney) has moved on to a female partner (Kamilah Martin).

Paul Clay's set illustrates the story in bluntly representational strokes. A garbage can plays a wood stove. A metal table and chairs define the apartment and later a health food restaurant. ``Rent'' isn't about scenery or choreography or direction. It's about real, flawed people and the way they try to survive and love and create.

Behind Roger's scowl and Mimi's taunting pelvis and skintight pants are a couple of wounded, yearning souls. ``I should tell you,'' they keep singing to each other in a halting musical phrase, unable to confess to each other the things they fear about themselves.

Maureen and her lawyer lover, Joanne, are their squabbling opposites. Sometimes their fights are petty and familiar; sometimes, in the powerhouse duet ``Take Me or Leave Me,'' they're punishing.

The performers wear head mikes to belt out the lyrics of Larson's hard-driving rock numbers. But this wonderfully varied score, which quotes Puccini and nursery songs, also taps gospel and tango and a wistful pulse that's all its own.

``Rent'' has its failings. The narrative gets jerked along at times. An answering-machine gag grows old.

But even the set's dramatic ugliness seems transformed and freshly seen by the end of the night. Is that twisted mass of metal art or an airplane wreck suspended over the stage? ``Rent'' sends its characters aloft on an exhilarating, uncertain flight, and the audience flies along with them. It's the musical-theater ride of the year.