by Celia R. Baker
Salt Lake Tribune
November 12, 2000

Two years ago, "Rent" roared into Salt Lake City for the first time, nearly selling out its run. Now "Rent" is due again. The second touring company of Jonathan Larson's rock musical brings the bittersweet story of Mimi, Roger, Angel and their East Village milieu to the stage of Capitol Theatre Nov. 14-19.

Larson drew his inspiration for "Rent" from Puccini's "La Boheme," about a group of young artistes living in poverty in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The opera broke ground with its stark portrayal of cold, hunger, disease and promiscuity among youthful painters, musicans, actors, writers and intellectuals on the Left Bank.

"La Boheme's" hard-living dreamers and tubercular heroine shocked the public in the 1890s, but the opera soon entered the mainstream as a masterpiece of the verismo movement -- a word that denotes realism and truthfulness in art. Transporting the story forward one century gives it even more grit. Paying the rent while living for art is just as difficult in the contemporary age, but today there are more ways to be unconventional, and more ways to die while doing it.

The characters of "Rent" are as much a caseload as a cast. Roger and Mimi both have AIDS; he's a rocker trying to create a lasting song before he succumbs to his disease; she's an exotic dancer with a heroin addiction. Maureen (inspired by Puccini's Musetta) leaves her boyfriend, Mark, for Joanne, a lawyer. Angel is an endearing drag queen on a collision-course with death; Tom Collins is the love he leaves behind.

From the margins and out of the gutters they rail against "living in America at the end of the millennium" in a society that says "you are what you own." Their message is that when life is brief and hard, it can't be measured in minutes, only in experiences shared, only in love.

The theme of "Rent" was given a hard-hitting immediacy by the death of its creator, Jonathan Larson, hours before the show was to open in previews off-Broadway. Larson's death, attributed to an aortic aneurism, brought a whirlwind of media attention to "Rent," which went on to win the 1996 Tony Award for Best Musical and Pulitzer Prize for drama, amid a host of other accolades. The show was hailed as the vanguard of new generation of Broadway musicals formed from the vocabulary of rock music.

Four years later it is evident that "Rent" hasn't revolutionized Broadway as predicted; no ensuing rock musicals have approached its success, and the hot tickets on Broadway are not especially adventuresome -- revivals such as "Kiss Me, Kate" and mainstream blockbusters such as "The Lion King."

Jacqueline B. Arnold plays Joanne in the "Rent" touring company. Her experiences as an actress in New York and elsewhere have taught her that the artist's life depicted in "Rent" has plenty of basis in reality.

"I've been an artist all my life, and people with a high range of creativity and a strong desire to express it are always going to be on the outside. The kids who are really creative often end up doing badly in school -- they're bored, and they don't want to be there. This show deals with these people wanting to do what they do best. They find there are always obstacles. Reality can be really rough on you as an artist."

Jay Raphael, director of the University of Utah's Actor Training Program, and an actor in New York for many years, says that while his own experience doesn't parallel "Rent," "the general sense of the play is probably very true. If you and I were to go tomorrow and walk through the Village, we would recognize these kids."

"Young kids always think that what they are doing is something new," says Arnold. Referencing classic works like "Romeo and Juliet" and "La Boheme," she adds, "If you pay attention to history, you might not want to do some of this anymore. It's not your idea. It's not that hard to live life calmly."

Arnold says she's glad to have a voice in "Rent," especially playing the role of Joanne, "a young woman, a lawyer, someone well-bred who happens to be a lesbian."

"I get fan mail for being up there and saying what I say. I don't play up Joanne's being a lesbian. That's just who she is, not something she's devised. It's good that we represent everybody possible up here -- that's why I think the show does well. People come, and they feel represented and spoken for. That has to be a good feeling."