by Anthony Del Valle
LV Citylife
August 12, 1999

It's no secret that the biggest challenge facing musical theater today is how to get young people interested. Musicals were once the nation's pop music. If you were listening to a top 40 hit back in the '50s, chances are you were listening to a song from a Broadway show. But somewhere around the mid-'60s, Broadway and pop culture went their separate ways. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin--they made no sense to the aging men who ran The Great White Way. Their thinking seemed to be, "If we ignore this new crazy sound, it will disappear."

It didn't. It's Broadway that disappeared. The sound of musicals became antiquated when Broadway stopped listening to America. Musicals had become an entertainment for old people. And it had little to do with economics. "Poor" 20-year-olds willing to shell out $150 for an Elton John concert wouldn't go to a Broadway musical for free.

Things changed a bit in the mid-'80s when Brit Andrew Lloyd Webber came along with the likes of Phantom of the Opera and Cats. But what young people got high on in Webber shows wasn't quality music, but spectacle. The American musical remained an endangered species because it was no longer a part of young people's lives.

Then along came Rent.

The 1996 adaptation of Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme is a love story written by, about and for young people. The amazing news is young adults are responding to it in record numbers. It's a big hit in New York and on the road. Gone from the auditoriums featuring the show are the flashy jewelry, furs and aging creams that had become fixtures in the typical Broadway theater crowd. Many of the people who make a point of seeing Rent have made a point in the past to avoid Broadway altogether. The older musical theater lovers tend to complain that Rent is too noisy, too rock. But it may well be the first quality musical to speak to contemporary America in more than 30 years.

"It'll be interesting to see how it does in Vegas," one local public relations official says. "Rent does sellout crowds everywhere with young people, but Vegas has always marched to a different drum."

The show isn't coming till Oct. 27. The Las Vegas Hilton has booked the musical for a 12-day run--a long booking by local standards. It could have come earlier, but the show was rejected by other theater owners.

"The theater crowd is an older crowd in Vegas," says one official, whose theater had earlier passed on Rent. "I'm not sure they'll support this. The people in Vegas who would love Rent are not the people who go to the theater."

But Hilton publicist Andy Maiden thinks there's been a shift in Vegas audiences. "There are some great acts in town, but Vegas entertainment is in need of some change," he says. "Look at how well Chicago is doing at Mandalay Bay. Broadway shows are catching [local] people's attention now. And the ticket sales for Rent are doing very well. There's still plenty of seats available, but the advance sale has been excellent."

As most theater buffs know, Rent has an irresistibly ironic history. Its book, music and lyrics were written by an East Village man who was as poor as most of the "squatters" he wrote about. His workshop material brought him to the attention of Stephen Sondheim, who was a frequent moral supporter and critic. Larson's talent was bringing in tons of respect, but little cash. Rent was going well in rehearsal off-Broadway, and it looked like Larson was finally going to see some financial rewards. But on Jan. 26, 1996--the day before previews began at the New York Theatre Workshop and two hours after giving a New York Times interview--the author died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm. It was 10 days before his 36th birthday.

His show wound up being so successful that it moved to Broadway, won a slew of Tonys, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Newsweek, in a cover story, labeled the show "a shocking jolt of creative juice." Rolling Stone claimed the musical was "reinventing Broadway." The New Yorker drooled, "Larson's talent has taken the audience to places where the musical never ventures these days."

Larson's death was ironic because his lead male character--Roger--is an HIV-positive man who is determined to write one great song so he can go out in a blaze of glory. Rent is Larson's exit music. It caused a revolution on Broadway because producers are now thinking it is possible to tell a story with a modern musical sound and please critics and young audiences alike.

Larson's script keeps a strong parallel with La Boheme. Rodolfo, the poet, is now Roger, the rock musician; Mimi, the seamstress with tuberculosis, is now Mimi, the HIV-positive junkie. Their love affair is the central issue of the musical, but, as with La Boheme, the relationships between a score of friends and acquaintances and one nasty landlord dominate the show. (There's a new twist, though, to Mimi's famous death scene.)

While it's Larson's music that has piqued the interest of the young non-theatergoer, it's his lyrics that come closest to brilliance. He has a bit of Sondheim's gift for word play, and Cole Porter's knack for nonsensical giddiness. Rent isn't brilliant, but it's full of smudges of genius. You can't help but mourn what might have been.

The show's value is in suggesting that Broadway music doesn't have to be all museum pieces or flashy visual gimmicks. Rent producer Jeffrey Seller, who was 31 when the show first opened, told Newsweek, "I came to Broadway because I was excited by the question, 'Can you challenge the mainstream? Can you reinvent the mainstream from inside the mainstream?'" Larson's work answers that question. His one "blaze of glory" shows that the American musical can speak to anyone--providing, of course, it really has something to say."