by Karen D'Souza
Sacramento Bee
March 5, 2000

"One song/before I go./Glory./One song to leave behind."

These lyrics from "Rent" ache with the longing and ambition that then unknown composer Jonathan Larson must have felt on the eve of the show's off-Broadway debut in January 1996. He had no way of knowing that the song would soon become his epitaph.

After the final dress rehearsal of "Rent," the 35-year-old Larson went home to his Manhattan hovel, suffered an aortic aneurysm and died. What he left behind was a rock-opera reinvention of "La Boheme" that would go on to win every accolade from the Tony Award to the Pulitzer Prize, becoming by far the biggest musical smash of the 1990s.

Now, as "Rent" moves into the Community Center Theater, opening Tuesday and running through next Sunday, four years have passed since the show was born and its creator died. At the time, "Rent" admirers -- everyone from Stephen Sondheim, Larson's mentor, to Newsweek magazine -- dubbed the show a theatrical landmark whose post-modern score and Gen-X Zeitgeist would transform the Broadway stage into a brave new musical world.

Naysayers observed that perhaps it was Larson's personal tragedy, the irony of his dying in obscurity and not the show's own merit, that thrust "Rent" into the spotlight and fueled the phenomenon known as Rentmania. After all, it was only two hours before his death, in his first and last interview with the New York Times, that Larson happily said, "I think I may have a life as a composer."

As Sacramento Light Opera Association impresario Leland Ball, reached during Music Circus auditions in New York, remarks, "It's sad to watch 'Rent' in a way, knowing that (Larson) will never write another show."

Get beyond the undeniably poignant backstage drama and the tsunami of hype, some suggest, and "Rent" comes closer to pop culture ephemera than timeless masterpiece. David MacDonald, producer of the Broadway Playhouse, falls into this camp.

"It's not one of my favorites. The score is average and the story is OK, nowhere near worth all the hype and raves it got," MacDonald says. "I think a lot of people were just touched by the fact that the creator died."

Not surprisingly, "Rent" musical director Boko Suzuki bristles at this suggestion, countering, "There's no denying that Jonathan's death launched the show and brought it attention it wouldn't have had, but that attention petered out and now the show stands on its own."

"Rent" chronicles a year in the life of a bohemian community of dispossessed artists and slackers struggling to survive in Alphabet City, a grimy neighborhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Like Larson, this crowd of MTV castoffs -- from the indie filmmaker Roger to the drag queen Angel and the exotic dancer Mimi -- have fears that they may cease to be. Poverty, AIDS and drug addiction threaten to cut short their lives and their art.

They struggle to pay the rent, as the title suggests, and have nothing but scorn for "suits," their name for upwardly mobile 9-to-5-ers who live only for their 401(k)s. These renters see their meager lifestyles as a political statement against a consumption-crazy society. Hence the pointed refrain from "What You Own": "When you're living in America/at the end of the millennium/you're what you own."

Scrimping and sacrificing was the way Larson himself lived. On the eve of "Rent's" Los Angeles opening in 1997, Jonathan Burkhart, a longtime friend of Larson's, recalled the playwright's meager lifestyle, slinging hash at a seedy diner and riding a bicycle around New York: "Jonathan was a guy who would maybe buy a new pair of sneakers once a year."

To be sure, the characters in "Rent" are anything but mainstream. Four of the seven leading characters are HIV-positive and the central romantic couple (Mimi and Roger) bond over bags of heroin and AZT breaks. "Oklahoma!" it's not.

Larson's father, also on hand for the Los Angeles premiere, explained that his son's mission as a musical theater composer was to create a " 'Hair' for the '90s."

"Jonathan's only wish was to bring the MTV generation into the theater," said Al Larson, his eyes scanning the swarm of 20something hipsters crowding the Los Angeles Music Center that night, "and he made it come true."

Certainly, "Rent" drips with the emblems of youthful coolness, from flippy hair and wiry black glasses to clunky Doc Marten shoes. Larson's score, notably in the raucous "La Vie Boheme" number, enumerates all things trendy in a syncopated anthem to '90s alternative culture: "Emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion./Creation, vacation, mucho masturbation./Compassion, to fashion, to passion when it's new./To Sontag, to Sondheim, to anything taboo."

"What 'Rent' did was prove definitively that young people will go to the theater," Ball says. "What's more, young people give a show legs because they go back and see it again and again."

Certainly, "Rent's" marketing strategy has been to tap into the pulse of the youth culture and aggressively target the 20-to-30-year-old audience from the start. One of the most successful promotions, which has since been copied by other shows, has been to sell the first two rows of orchestra seats for $20 instead of the usual rate. The tickets go on sale at the box office two hours before each performance.

This strategy, which will be in effect in Sacramento, works on two public relations fronts. Not only does it combat the notion that theater is essentially an art form for the rich, but all those retro-clad slackers standing in line imbue "Rent" with a hipper-than-thou edge.

Once inside the theater, "Rent" does indeed sound a little like a rock concert. To MacDonald, it is precisely the decibel level of the show that scares away some traditional (read: older) theatergoers. "Naturally, young people love it," MacDonald says, "but some of the older folks get driven crazy by the screeching decibel levels."

Suzuki, on the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, believes that the slacker trappings, and the aura of coolness they project, have nothing to do with the staggering success of the piece.

"It has less to do with the clothes and the topics of homosexuality, homelessness and drugs, and more to do with a feeling of community and love and friendship," Suzuki says. "Those are things you can relate to even if you're not an artist living in the East Village."

Shaun Earl, who plays Angel, the cross-dressing diva at the soul of the show has no doubts that "Rent's" lease on the public imagination will transcend the boundaries of time. He sees the show as a whole, and his character in particular, as a rock riff on life, love and the meaning of existence.

To be sure, Angel qualifies as the show's wisest character, a drag queen whose infinite wardrobe is matched only by his boundless sense of humanity. It is Angel, a street musician, who binds the "Rent" gang together with his wit, optimism and charm. Somehow, when Angel tells it, even doggie homicide (he bumps off a yappy pet Akita in "Today 4 U") sounds civilized.

Earl considers Angel a breakthrough gay character whose depth and scope go a long way to shattering stereotypes about being gay, black and dying in America at the fin-de-millennium.

"To look beyond all facades that we put up in life," Earl says. "That's the message of 'Rent.' It's about living life to the fullest even when your days are numbered. It's about not giving up on our world. There's no day but today."

Which is just the Zen sort of statement that makes wondering about whether "Rent" will endure into the future seem like a moot point.