by Kirby
SEE Magazine
November 3, 2000

Variety says he has a "sexy, brooding presence." The Orange County Register says his acting raises the bar to a level "the New York production never achieved." And Seventeen magazine lured its young readers with a promise of "six hot new guys who’ll rock your world." Inside, the article Heads up: You won’t want to take your eyes off this six-pack of hot new superstars, delivered home-town boy Christian Mena, alongside the likes of Usher and Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek.

Mena shrugs off the significance of the kind of attention he’s received since joining the trendy hit musical Rent. If you ever saw Mena with his band !Maracujah!, you’ll remember he strutted the stage like a peacock; swaggering with more bravado than most people can hope to muster. Now, he’s more prudent; less likely to dish the dirt and name the names.

"Please don’t tell that story," Mena beseeches. "Oh, let’s not talk about that," he pleads.

So you’ve got to twist his arm to tell the tales. He won’t talk about the time he got called out to a limo in the theatre parking lot, the window rolls down and it’s Jodie Foster. She wanted to tell him how good his performance was. Or the time Jason Alexander, Jennifer Tilly, John Ritter or Paul Reubens were in the audience. But he will talk about the night Robert de Niro was in the front row.

"Yes, I knew de Niro was in the audience and to be honest, I avoided looking for him," Mena laughs. "Okay, I got to meet Henry Winkler, he’s the only person I’ve met that I felt I was star struck, cause he’s The Fonz."

Oh and he met a famous 1980’s rocker, after performing an AIDS benefit for Tom Hanks’ wife Rita Wilson.

"This guy with really long hair was talking to me, saying, ‘Man, your vibrato is so fast – I haven’t heard any like that since the old British singers, I love your voice.’ And I was all ‘thanks, man.’ Then after I walked away I realized who it was and I ran back and said ‘No way, dude, you’re Tommy Shaw!.’"

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Mena isn’t hanging out with the lead guitarist and singer from Styx or anything.

"But you know, these people are Hollywood friends – not friends, they’re acquaintances. You get to know them, you hang out with them four times and then you see them and they pretend they don’t know you . . . I’m so not set up to be in that world. The perfect quote on that is from Rage Against The Machine: ‘the élite, it’s an American dream.’"

So what, then, is Mena’s dream? At one time it was at the heart and soul of ¡Maracujah!, a group that was a little ahead of the Ricky Martin-led Latino-pop explosion. Maybe the biggest question is: what did Christian Mena trade off in order to be in Rent? Did he come out ahead in the deal?

"Definitely being in Rent gave me a profile I never would have had, for better or worse. It was a career change and for the most part, I don’t spend much time speculating on what would have happened if I’d went the other way," Mena matter-of-factly states.

Last year he left Rent and cashed in on the exposure the show gave him. There’s a bit role in the forthcoming film Rat Race with Whoopi Goldberg and Mena’s in a scene with Cuba Gooding Jr. He’s also in the movie Bad Faith, as the lover of Gloria Rubens (from ER). Mena stars on the small screen as well, as Rico, a gay man who was Barbra Streisand’s personal assistant in Beggars and Choosers on Bravo. He recently taped an episode of Back to Black for the music cable TV channel VH1.

"It wasn’t a big role, I was a singer on stage but I got to do one of my own songs, so that was very cool," says Mena.

Mena’s not a stranger to the talk-show circuit either. He was on ex- Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Terry Bradshaw’s Home Team show, being interviewed and wailing Glory, his signature song from Rent. He sang a duet with Neil Patrick Harris (a former Rent co-star and TV’s Doogie Howser) on Rosie O’Donnell. Mena appeared on Ansel and Fred and was interviewed live on The Later Show by supermodel Cindy Crawford.

Yes, the man’s throat better be insured; voice-over work has been plentiful as well. If you fly Air Chile, it’s Mena’s voice you’ll hear in the headphones. He’s been on Nickelodeon’s most popular kid’s show, Hey Arnold. There are irons in other fires, too, but he’s careful with his choices. He has no desire to go back to L.A., where he lived for five months. "Musically, it’s a void," he says.

"You go to New York and it’s happening, there’s avant-garde theatre . . .

Whatever you’re looking for, you can find it in New York. You’re into the folk scene, there’s a folk scene; you’re into hip-hop, there’s a hip-hop scene; you’re into funk, there’s a funk scene; you’re into jazz, there’s a jazz scene . . . "

And if you’re a singer and actor and you’re into Broadway musicals, what do you do? "I’d love to do Le Miz or Aida," he states.

Who knows what might happen. He left Rent, then re-upped because he wanted to perform the show when it hit the Jube. The prodigal son’s return to Rent is good because, while the hype doesn’t trickle all the way down here, in the U.S. the show’s a pop-culture phenomenon. Credited with injecting fresh life into the sometimes-stale world of Broadway musicals, Rent is the first play since A Chorus Line to win a Tony for Best Musical and a Pulitzer for Best Drama; it also garnered three other Tonys and six Drama Desk awards.

The story is based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme, updated to a gritty clique of loft-dwelling, New York artists. These disenfranchised Gen-Xers try not only to pay the rent while they struggle to create beauty, but to carry on that struggle under the grim shadow of AIDS, just as the artists in La Boheme were afflicted by the disease of their day, tuberculosis.

Of the 15-player cast, there are three semi-leads: Mena as singer-songwriter Roger Davis (Puccini’s Rodolfo, a big role); his love interest, Mimi, an HIV-positive junkie who "dances" for a living; and Roger’s roommate and his best friend, chic geek Mark, the nascent filmmaker who narrates the show.

But life after Rent will be a Canadian dream. Mena is returning to Vancouver, where he now lives. "I feel very inspired in that city," Mena claims. "I’ve been writing so much lately it’s awesome. And I intend on recording a CD . . . I’m going to hook-up music again. But I love acting, too, and I’ll continue studying.

"I’m lucky, my voice is at a stage now that I can do whatever I want . . . you know, all the discipline and all the struggles I went through in the first year and a half of Rent made me so strong vocally. I’ve got all my range back, I can scream higher than I ever have before and my voice is thicker than it ever has been. So, it’s prepared me to be able to sing and really to do whatever I want – sing every night, no problem."

Don’t miss Mena singing his heart out in the Edmonton première of Rent, playing the Jubilee Auditorium Tuesday, Nov. 7 to Sunday, Nov. 12. Tickets are on sale now at the Jube box office or from TicketMaster at 451-8000. Performances are Tuesday to Sunday evenings, with matinees Saturday and Sundays.

"In my head, I was done. I was doing well in Vancouver, we had just moved there and things were good, but I wanted the opportunity to do Rent in Edmonton."