by Liz Nicholss
Edmonton Journal
November 3, 2000

Rent

Company: American Touring Production

Directed by: Michael Greif

Starring: Christian Mena, Maggie Banjamin, Matt Caplan, Shaun Earl, Brian N. Love, Saycon Sengbloh

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: Tuesday through November 12

Tickets: TicketMaster (451-8000)

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It's 1997. And an Edmonton singer/songwriter in a hot, happening local Latin dance band called Maracujah figures that rent is something to be paid once a month, not something to be performed eight times a week.

Musicals? The only one he knows is Jesus Christ, Superstar. Mainly, he admits, because it's also a movie.

When Rent comes to town next week, trailing raves and credentials (both the 1996 Pulitzer and Tony) as the landmark piece of '90s musical theatre, Christian Mena is once more in a starring role he'd never heard of three years ago, but made his own anyway.

He'd left the show after 18 months to resume his musician's life. But as soon as he knew his home town was on the itinerary for the American touring production, he signed up again for three months' Rent. "I love Edmonton. My family, my friends are there. That's the reason." And a revisiting of his favourite haunts is definitely in order: the Black Dog pub, Devlin's, The Billiard Club, the Sidetrack.

Mena's story isn't exactly a textbook of hoary showbiz wisdom about stardom as a prize that must be pursued with carnivorous single-mindedness. A soft-spoken, rather serious sort, with a self-deprecating sense of humour, the Chilean-born Mena recalls, with some bemusement, his Toronto audition. The character up for grabs was Angel, an Hispanic drag queen who finds true love and dies in the course of Jonathan Larson's streetwise contemporary tale, inspired by Puccini's La Boheme, of struggling young artists in New York's East Village.

"The minute I started they shut me down.... Well, Angel is this petite transvestite with a sweet high voice. I can do it, but it's not me. And I'm pretty big. I'm the biggest guy in the cast."

The upshot was that Mena landed the central role of Roger, a troubled rock singer/songwriter who's HIV positive. And Maracujah's lead singer suddenly found himself catapulted onto the mainstage at the La Jolla Playhouse, preparing for an L.A. debut and an American tour -- in a word, acting. Big time. "It was definitely a feeling of 'I'm in over my head'," laughs Mena. "I was surrounded by people who had done lots. Well-known names. People who had been in Broadway shows. TV stars with lots of acting credits. And here I was, someone who'd never acted a lick in his life.... The music I knew I could handle; the acting was, to say the least, a little frightening." The experience "turned me into a completely different person."

His new castmates helped out, especially Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser MD of telly fame) with whom he bonded instantly and hung out. But there were things about theatre that weren't so very different from the musician's life, after all. "True, much better hotels," he says with a laugh, on the phone from a very decent example in Denver. "Much more money. But aside from that, you approach the art in much the same way."

And the Rent groupies, the repeaters who follow the hit musical city to city and hover outside the stage door, or the multitude of Rent Web site chat-rooms populated by teenage girls much struck by the actor with the cinematic good looks -- well, they weren't entirely foreign to Mena post-Maracujah. After all, for a couple of years, the band, formed by Mena and cohort Rubin de Toledo -- from a fusion of Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, funk and pop influences after they visited their South American homeland -- was Edmonton's hottest act, packing out clubs and generally riding the Latin dance music wave.

"I try to avoid a lot of that stuff," says Mena gently, of female fans in pursuit. "I guess I like my privacy; I like to leave my job at the end of the day.... It was fun at first. Then it wasn't." His wife Sandra, the Edmonton-born social worker he dated during the whole rise of Maracujah ("she's my counsellor") isn't fazed by the attention. "She's pretty used to it." Maracujah threw a pre-wedding bash at the Sidetrack, a rare case of a guy playing his own stag.

What gives Rent its heart and its edge, figures Mena, is something he's always found in abundance in Latin culture and lacking elsewhere: "The celebration of life and what it is."

The arts are built in, not grafted on. The mainstream culture "is about amassing material possessions. As a character in Rent says, when you live in America you are what you own."

With Larson's alternative rock opera, the American musical theatre suddenly looked at the gritty world outside the stage door. "Starving artists, people with AIDS, the homeless. There's nothing that shocking about it, of course, but musicals never went there." Mena knows something about that world, growing up as he did in the Edmonton inner city, a block from the Cromdale Hotel. He was the kid who played in every kind of garage rock band. He did funk; he did alternative rock. He was in Dave Babcock's Jump Orchestra; he was in an r&b/soul cover band called The Devotees.

He appreciates that Rent is "a special show with something to say. ... It's about measuring your life in love. It's about 'no day but today' (in the words of one of the songs). The impact of the show on the mainstream will really be felt in the next five or six years. It's real, it's gritty, it's edgy. And it works best when it's acted that way. Its true-to-lifeness gives it an impact. It opens your heart and maybe changes your life."

Mena can see why it draws a younger crowd into the theatre. "They're looking for something to believe in, to put their support behind." And he can understand his character Roger's quest to write one really great, meaningful song before he dies.

A year ago he left Rent, to be a musician and look for TV and film work in L.A. The city doesn't appeal to him. "There's no real music scene; it's a recording city. ... As for the film stuff, I don't have a green card."

So Mena and his wife moved to Vancouver four months ago. "I'm instantly working a lot more," especially TV. In fact, he's particularly pleased that one of his own songs, Mystified, was used in a Back To Black episode.

And he's writing songs -- but no Maracujah repeats. "My music is much more acoustic rock, a bit harder now. Latin, but only in the background. The Latin influence made me as a child. And it's still there. But what comes next isn't going to be dance music."

THE MAKING OF A COUNTER-CULTURE PHENOMENON

- It was seven years in the gestation. And two hours after the last dress rehearsal, just as Rent was about to start previews in the funky East Village theatre where its premiere would grab media attention like no musical in recent memory, its 35-year-old creator suddenly died of an aneurism.

The1996 death of Jonathan Larson didn't stop the momentum of his rock musical, though. Rent would reopen on Broadway (for a relatively modest $2 million), after a bidding war. It would scoop up every major award, including the Tony and the Pulitzer, and accolades that would label it the signal counter-culture musical of its generation, the Hair of the '90s.

Larson had been writing in the '80s. The great Sondheim himself had encouraged Larson's rock musical Superbia, for example. He'd performed a rock monologue tick, tick ... BOOM! at New York Theater Workshop where Rent began, across the street from Cafe La Mama. He'd written the odd film score. But basically, like his own Rent characters, Larson was unknown, aspiring, living the bohemian life and struggling to make the rent and keep his dreams afloat as he waited tables and made endless demo tapes.

The brash 1996 musical for which he will be remembered is based on Puccini's ultra-romantic opera of a century before: La Boheme, with its circle of rebels and outsiders. Larson set Rent amongst the impoverished artists, the derelicts, the junkies of New York's East Village, a subculture of every brand of sexuality, shadowed by HIV and threatened by slum landlords.