by Steven Winn
San Francisco Chronicle
June 3, 2001

[ right next to this article was "AIDS at 20" - click here ]

In 1989, when Jonathan Larson began writing the book, music and lyrics for "Rent," George Bush was president. The show's Broadway opening, in the spring of 1996, came in the pre-Monica innocence of Bill Clinton's first term.

Now, five years after the widely touted "rock opera of the '90s" took New York and then the nation and world by storm, "Rent" is back in a new millennium and second Bush administration. A six-week run opens Wednesday at the Orpheum Theatre. The producers are hoping box-office business will merit a longer stay.

Heralded as the anthem for a disenfranchised generation, Larson's gritty and lyrical tale of love, art, AIDS, drug abuse, computer cowboys, homelessness and rapacious real estate speculation has become a theatrical institution. Since branching out to Boston in late '96, "Rent" has played cities of all sizes and demographic descriptions in a steady road run.

It's been to Cleveland and Kalamazoo, San Francisco (for 27 weeks in 1999) and Greenville, S.C. Green Bay, Wis., and Iowa City, Iowa, have already had their second helpings of "Rent." The show's international travels include England, Italy, Iceland, Holland, Hungary and three tours of Japan -- once in the original English version and twice in Japanese. The Broadway production, meanwhile, steams on at the Nederlander Theatre.

Does it all mean that "Rent" is just another commercial product of the type the story's Lower East Side denizens -- the artists, drag queens and HIV- positive drug addicts -- would deplore? How hip can a show this successful be?

The answer is a fascinating split decision. Watch young patrons line up everywhere for tickets, many of them devoted return customers who would otherwise not dream of darkening the door for a Broadway musical, and "Rent" really does seem to have caught lightning in a bottle.

"If you're 16 today," says producer Jeffrey Seller, "the show is still groundbreaking. It reflects your values, it has characters that could be your friends or lovers, and it's sung in a musical vocabulary you might hear on the radio." That's not just marketing. It's a verifiable truth, proved in cities as far and different from New York as they could be.

Like "Hair," "Rent's" 1967 spiritual and musical predecessor (which itself may be returning to Broadway in a new revival soon), Larson's rock opus welds power chords and electric guitar riffs to the kind of heroic us-versus-the- world vows that feel eternally, universally young.

"Is anyone in the mainstream?" the filmmaker Mark demands in "La Vie Boheme, " the show's ecstatic first-act closer. "Anyone alive, with a sex drive, tear down the wall -- aren't we all? The opposite of war isn't peace . . . It's creation." This may be a grimier, wised-up vision, with the twin killers of AIDS and drugs looming and the stakes of '90s real estate rising, but "Rent" celebrates its own quixotic "Age of Aquarius."

It's no wonder the no-name stars became countercultural emblems when the show opened, blanketing the news and celebrity magazines and plastered onto a grunge-chic fashion campaign at Bloomingdale's. Rebellion, smartly packaged, has a strong commercial upside.

Larson's own tragic death, of an aortic aneurysm on the eve of "Rent's" off- Broadway premiere, added immeasurably to the show's compelling hold on young audiences. The "One Song Glory" the HIV-positive character Mark hoped to write before he died became Larson's own poignant last signature. Dying for what you love is a romantic fixation, as old as "Romeo and Juliet," for the young. "Rent" had a story line, onstage and off, as gripping as they come.

It also came from a rebel who was very respectful of his roots. Now that the hoopla's faded, "Rent's" apparently undimmed hipness can be seen in a clearer light. While its subject matter, language, swaggering attitude and decibel level may trumpet insurgent values, Larson created a strongly traditional piece of music theater. "Rent," maybe more than its young fans know, is deeply involved with the past.

The plot is a direct borrow from an opera a hundred years old (Puccini's "La Boheme"). The score, which is far more varied in technique than, say, "The Who's Tommy" or even "Jesus Christ Superstar," is anything but a rock manifesto. There are sweet ballads, a witty tango, rhythm-and-blues, Puccini quotations, delicate dissonance, Christmas carols and various other flavors in the music.

Larson hadn't mastered his craft, but the language in "Rent" is just as often droll and slyly irreverent as it is ardently blunt. He rhymes "Stoli" with "Holy Night" and "curry vindaloo" with "Maya Angelou." Songs and whole scenes, like the stuttering one that opens the show with the filmmaker Mark's narrative recitative, are complexly structured.

Some theatergoers complain that "Rent" is hard to follow. The amplified music gets blamed for obscuring the lyrics. Larson's need to pack in as much as he could, in both narrative and emotional content, may be just as daunting as the musical volume.

Listen to the bruised, impacted lines and shadowy lyricism of Roger and Mimi's "Another Day," and you hear a musical theater artist trying to get at the layered ambiguities of love. A reference to Stephen Sondheim in "La Vie Boheme" is telling: Larson was paying tribute to his artistic idol and mentor. "Rent" may finally be a lot closer to "Company" and "Passion" than it is to "Hair" or millennial rock music.

Loaded with time-capsule details (AIDS support groups, a brilliant performance-art parody, lines about Prozac, Ted Koppel and Newt Gingrich's lesbian sister), "Rent" is firmly entrenched in its era. The show didn't usher in a rock revolution on Broadway, and it was, sadly, the end as well as the beginning of Larson's career. It still stands alone.

"Rent's" currency, finally, may have to do with its singular, sui generis nature. Edgy and sentimental, rebellious and traditional, the show speaks from the heart in its own urgent, flawed voice. That, as much as anything, may keep renewing the audience for "Rent." People keep seeing and hearing themselves, their pain and passion and stumbling awkwardness, in a show that's first and finally about what it feels like to be young.