by Mary Kuntz
Buffalo News
December 3, 1999

"Rent," the Broadway rock musical that opens at Shea's Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, is set in New York's East Village, among exotic dancers, transvestites and performance artists.

In some ways, though, that wild world is not so very far from home.

Loosely based on Puccini's "La Boheme," "Rent" captures that idealistic period many young, creative people go through, when art matters more than money. Roger, a songwriter, and his filmmaker roommate, Mark, are poor but proud. Mark's wealthy family keeps calling him from the Hamptons, but he eschews their way of life. Meanwhile, Roger battles a messy personal situation: His ex-girlfriend, Maureen, has left him for another woman, and his new girlfriend, Mimi, is an exotic dancer with AIDS. As the story unfolds, the bohemians - gay and straight, black, white and Hispanic - band together, celebrating their shared goals and sense of community. (A bit self-righteously, "Rent" ends with Mark rejecting a high-paying, corporate job.)

What artist has not gone through a "Rent" phase?

Cockroaches on the keys

Pianist Don Rebic, who just got back from touring with jazz singer Kevin Mahogany, teaches at Fredonia State College. But he spent 20 years in New York City, and he discovered there what it's like to live the blues.

Right out of college, he took up residence at the Hotel Bretton Hall at Broadway and 86th Street. "I moved to New York with $400 and all my stuff in the back of my station wagon," he recalls. "I couldn't find the street where my hotel was. I couldn't find Broadway. I started thinking: Maybe this wasn't such a good idea.

"I ended up staying at the hotel for two months. I shared a bathroom with three other people. I had a Fender Rhodes, and I schlepped that up to my room. It's my first night in New York, and I'm watching cockroaches crawl across my keyboard."

Comedian Tom Irwin, though still in his 20s, is already nostalgic about his formative years. Irwin has gotten a break: He's off to Los Angeles, where he has won a spot with the Groundlings, the prestigious comedy troupe that launched Pee Wee Herman and Steve Guttenberg. But he regrets leaving his Allentown apartment, a "Rent"-like setting near Founding Fathers Pub and a cross-dressing shop run by a transvestite named Miss Susie. "I don't have any desire to dress that way right now," Irwin cracks, "but I love that there are shops like that in my neighborhood."

Struggling to pay rent, he once worked three jobs at once. "I was the world's worst waiter," he laughs. "If I got a tip, I was shocked. People ate whole meals without utensils. I was brutal."

Cheap jug wine

Peggy Farrell, who sings jazz frequently with pianist Al Tinney, spent most of the '60s in North Beach, San Francisco's Greenwich Village. Married at the time to an artist, she spent the time helping sell her husband's paintings and singing folk songs in coffee shops.

A Russian Jewish farmer ("the Nazis spared him because he was a great artist") brought apples, eggs, cheese and wine, and Farrell baked pies and sold them to bars for $1.50. People held rent parties. The beverage of choice, Ferrell adds gleefully, was a red wine that sold for 98 cents a gallon.

Farrell knew Allen Ginsberg, although she couldn't have predicted the poet's fame. "He was just one of the crowd who would come to the house and drink the wine and rave about my pie."

The bohemian life made it easy to rub elbows with the famous. Buffalo rocker Mark Dixon discovered that in the late '60s and early '70s. That was when Dixon, who leads the classic rock band Party Squad, performed almost every night in the Los Angeles area and held a series of lowdown day jobs. "I worked in a junkyard, with guys that had the IQ of a shoe," he says. "It was the most depressing time of my life."

But it was also exciting. "You'd meet weird people," Dixon says. "At a Van Morrison concert, this girl went, "Excuse me, do you have a cigarette?' I looked at her ... holy (expletive), it's Joni Mitchell!"

Over the moon

Few people understand the "Rent" scene as well as 80-year-old theater director and television pioneer Fred Keller.

In 1961, Keller opened the Circle Art Theater on Connecticut Street, an experimental venue for foreign films. Soon afterward, he lost his job as program director for Channel 4. Because the theater's budget was so tight, a bohemian informality reigned. Artists painted movie posters. Folk singers sang between features. Keller paid his barber in tickets.

The theater itself needed work Keller couldn't afford. The roof leaked, and in the winter, the audience brought blankets.

"One day," Keller says, "water was streaming down the aisles, and somebody said it was coming in from the side door. I looked and sure enough, the drain in the alley had backed up. I had to take my shoes off and clear the drain in the street with my hands."

Despondent, Keller went to his office and began to dry off. Then he heard footsteps. It was Louie, a retarded man employed as an usher and ticket taker.

"I don't want to deal with Louie now," Keller recalls thinking. "But then Louie said, "Fred! Guess what? The moon's out.'

"He and I went out and sure enough, the storm was over, and there was the moon, sailing across the sky." He smiles. "All of a sudden, whatever happened, I knew the moon would still be shining, and everything would be OK."