by Kyle Lawson
Arizona Republic
March 22, 2000

Saycon Sengbloh has no problem finding role models for her drug-addicted, HIV-positive character of Mimi in Rent, the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical that returns to Gammage Auditorium on Tuesday. "I see Mimis walking down the street all the time," says the Atlanta-born singer-actress.

"Because this is a show, there's the misconception that these people are made up, that they don't exist in life. Look, there are a lot of kids out there going through bad times. They don't sing and dance, because life on the streets is no musical, but they're real. Jonathan (Larson, the show's creator) got it right."

Rent is a loose transcription of Puccini's opera La Boheme, about a group of young artists starving in Paris garrets. Larson transferred the setting to New York's Lower East Side and filled it with wannabe social workers, dancers, filmmakers, songwriters, computer geeks, performance artists, transvestites and the "fringe-feeders" who prey on them.

Mimi is an exotic dancer, a far cry, in the opening scenes at least, from Puccini's consumptive heroine.

"Art is an imitation of life, but it's also an entertainment, and that means there's going to be a certain amount of . . . of glamorization, I guess," Sengbloh says.

"That's not necessarily bad. You often find that people with a glamorous exterior have all kinds of hurt and things going on inside. The people with the worst traumas often put on the best show."

Eight performances a week, Sengbloh puts on that show. Does Mimi's tragic life ever get to her?

"It's a job," she says. "The theater is Mimi's home, whatever hotel I'm staying in that night is mine. It's pretty easy to let go. You just take off your mike and walk out the door. 'Course, there's always somebody outside who's going, "Hey, Mimi.' For audiences, you are that person. It's hard sometimes for them to make the distinction."