by John Fleming
St. Petersburg Times
4/7/98

Rent is different from other Broadway shows in many ways, and one of the most striking differences is in the casting. For the most part, unknowns and newcomers to top-level theater have made up the 15-member cast of the late Jonathan Larson's musical about Generation Xers in New York's East Village.

There wasn't a big name in the New York production that opened two years ago and continues to play to sold-out houses. The touring companies, one of which begins an engagement on Wednesday at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, have been similarly free of stars.

Perhaps the only actor recognizable to a wide audience who has appeared in Rent is Neil Patrick Harris, once the teenage title character of TV's Doogie Howser, M.D. In the Southern California production of Rent, he played Mark, a grunge filmmaker trying to resist the siren call of crass commerce by sticking to his art instead of taking an offer from a tabloid show.

Rock 'n' roll bands have spawned almost as many Rent performers as have acting troupes. Such non-traditional casting has been by artistic design, although the economic benefits of hiring non-stars, with non-star salaries, is not lost on producers.

"Unquestionably, it's been our greatest challenge," producer Jeffrey Seller said. "The good news is our creators have continued to find unique, talented young people to populate our stage. We're not trying to duplicate the original cast. We're just trying to find people who have their own specialness, their own idiosyncrasies, their own qualities that make them equally compelling, funny, lovable. We hired a kid right out of high school; we hire singers who have no experience onstage."

It's true that director Michael Greif can never be accused of just putting in a call to central casting to mount another company of Rent. Take how far afield he went in casting Angel and Collins, HIV-positive lovers whose relationship is close to the heart of the musical, which is loosely based on Puccini's opera La Boheme.

Angel is a drag queen, and Collins is an MIT dropout and computer whiz capable of cracking an ATM code. The two young actors playing the parts in the company that is coming to Tampa Bay have Cinderella stories to tell about how they ended up in the biggest hit show of their generation.

Mark Leroy Jackson, 29, was running a Pizza Hut in Michigan until a few years ago, when he quit his job to move to New  York to try to break into the music business. An aspiring jazz singer, Jackson hadn't been in a play since high school in Grand Rapids, and he went to an open casting call for Rent as something of a lark.

"I was crashing with a friend, doing odd jobs," Jackson said. "I went to an open call for Rent, just for the fun of going to an open call, not really expecting to get the gig, because I'd never really acted before. I waited seven hours that day for them to see me. Through a series of callbacks -- the whole process took about five months -- I got the gig."

Jackson credits Greif with teaching him how to act, but he also figures that he possesses a natural presence that is right for Collins, whom he sees as "eternally positive, strong-willed, confident, very caring, sort of the leader of the group."

He played Collins in the first U.S. touring company, which opened in Boston in November 1996, then was in the New York show and now has been with the second tour since it started out last summer at San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse, where Greif is artistic director. Yawning through a noontime phone interview from a St. Louis hotel room, Jackson doesn't question his good fortune in going from Pizza Hut to Rent.

"I'll probably know why this happened to me in 20 or 30 years," he said. "I just want to be creative and make a living doing it, so whatever happens is fine with me."

Andy Senor, 23, who plays Angel, also took an improbable route to Rent. A year ago, when he was a senior at Florida International University in Miami, he went to a mass audition for theater graduate schools held in Chicago, where Greif was one of the representatives screening candidates for the University of California at San Diego. After Senor did monologues from Henry V and Jeffrey, he was called back for a second session with Greif, during which he asked the director whether he might be considered for Rent.

"I just went in and simply stated my feelings within my monologues and was very human and very sensitive," Senor said. "I was nice and wasn't pretentious and was very vulnerable and open to him (Greif). I think that's what he probably saw."

Greif put the actor in touch with the show's New York casting agency, which hired him the day after he auditioned for the part of Angel. Senor's grad school plans went up on the shelf, and he started learning how to get around onstage in drag.

"It's difficult because it's hard to walk in those damn heels," he said. "But Angel's not really about being a drag queen, Angel's about being a person. The makeup and the wig and the dress and all that are no big deal. My problem in the beginning wasn't a fear of being a drag queen, it was a fear of learning to walk like one."

Rags-to-riches stories like those of Jackson and Senor are part and parcel of the Rent mystique. The history of the show has followed a real-life scenario that a Broadway producer would have dismissed as preposterous, even by the farfetched conventions of musical theater.

Larson labored for years on his vision of marrying rock 'n' roll with musical theater while waiting on tables and living in a cheap apartment in the East Village. When his show finally got produced in a small theater, the New York Theater Workshop, it captured the public imagination and was catapulted to Broadway, where it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Tony Award for best musical and many other accolades.

The fairy tale took a heartbreaking turn when the composer died from an aortic aneurysm after Rent's final dress rehearsal, just days before his 36th birthday.

"Jonathan had an amazing energy and love of people," said Paul Clay, who designed the Rent set, an amalgam of scrap-metal sculpture and artist's loft that accommodates an onstage band. "It was really hard to meet somebody who had so many things to say and was so full of life, and to work so closely with him, and then to have that short friendship so suddenly end."

Clay sees the composer's untimely death as hauntingly reflected in the musical's theme of living one day at a time. "It's clear he would have gone on to make very strong work, but you can't know or count on anything in life," he said. "I'm not one to have regrets about the past or to imagine possible futures. What things are is what they are, and I think Jonathan believed that,
too."

The tour cast members never met Larson, but they have come to know his mother, father and sister well, and they feel a sense of personal destiny about being in Rent.

"Although we didn't have any connection with him physically, I think spiritually and emotionally there's a strong connection between us and him," Senor said. "During our rehearsals we really felt his presence and his love.  Each night we thank him, and I believe he's really with us. He picked each and every one of us to do this for him."