by Charlie Patton
Florida Times-Union
January 19, 2000

A group of young bohemians squats in a tenement in the grimy Alphabet City section of New York, all of them ground down by poverty, half of them living with and beginning to die from AIDS.

Their story, based on an opera in which the tragic heroine dies of tuberculosis, was turned into a Broadway musical by a young man who dropped dead at 35 -- 10 days before his play opened.

That's doesn't sound like the formula for an exhilarating, life-affirming night of theater. But exhilarating and life-affirming isa good description of Rent, Jonathan Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, which opened last night at the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts with the first of eight performances.

Larson's electronic score, which marries elements of rap, rock, traditional Broadway show tunes and opera -- Puccini's La Boheme was his inspiration -- is terrific. It is splendidly performed, both by a small rock band that occupies part of the stage and by a cast that is loaded with wonderful voices and first-rate dancers.

There are eight major roles and sorting out who is whom is the first order of business:

Mark, an aspiring filmmaker, lives with Roger, a rock musician despondent since he learned he has AIDS. They have two former roommates: Benny, who married well, bought the building and moved out; and Tom Collins, a computer expert who teaches philosophy. Tom also has AIDS. So does Tom's lover, Angel, a cheerful transvestite.

Also living with AIDS is Mimi, a heroin addict who lives upstairs from Roger. The other two major characters are Maureen, a self-absorbed performance artist, who used to be Mark's girlfriend, and Maureen's new lover, Joanne, a lesbian lawyer. It's a polyglot mix of white and black, gay and straight, sick and healthy, which makes for a fascinating kind of polymorphous diversity. The story covers a year, from one Christmas Eve to the next. The tone ranges from silly to profound, from heart-breaking to rib-tickling.