by John Petkovik
Cleveland Live
May 18, 1999

"The frenzy before the crash." On Wall Street, the saying refers to how bull markets, overtaken by excess and panic buying, always rise to unsustainable levels before taking a swift dive.

Well, the saying applies to cultural trends, also. Just look at "Rent," Jonathon Larson's Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical. Based on Puccini's opera "La Boheme," "Rent" follows society's disenfranchised as they struggle to survive and make rent in Manhattan's Lower East Side. In other words, what happens when a junkie, a drag queen, a struggling filmmaker, a street urchin and a down-and-out musician confront AIDS, poverty and despair? In "Rent," the answer is simple: They celebrate one another with a song, a dance and a hug. That's where "Rent" achieves its "frenzy": It takes 1990s victim culture to its most extreme. The musical not only celebrates its cast as victims, it also glorifies the grunge culture in which they reside. The set connotes urban blight, but is full of MTV chic: bright lights, steel girders, dark alleys. The characters are dressed down, but fashionably so. And the score, which sounds like a garage band covering Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" album, is more hummable than it is harrowing.

That's what makes "Rent" such a '90s phenomenon. Unlike '80s escapist entertainment, which tempted the bored middle class with fantasies of cars, money, sex and status, "Rent" promises a fun-filled, virtual walk on the wild side: It's sexy, grunge-chic without the side effects. And while this is by no means a new trick - after all, grunge rock, heroin chic and "Pulp Fiction" all worked off of the same premise - "Rent" takes grunge-as-escapism to a new, sugary extreme.