by Anne-Marie Welsh
Union Tribune
March 16, 2000

Forget the plot. Forget the sprawling staging and spotty casting. If you just let the songs wash over you, that pure and steady stream of musical invention makes you aware of a huge talent, a terrible loss and all kinds of possibilities if Jonathan Larson had lived to write another musical.

"Rent" has returned, this time to the Civic Theatre. Four years after the show's hyped-to-the-limit premiere on Broadway, it's the music that still matters. Larson's theater songs (in Steve Skinner and Tim Weil's superb arrangements) sweep the spirit away with their passion, their wonderful variety and still-hip humor.

At Tuesday's opening, all those tattooed, bleached-blond patrons with pierced body parts responded enthusiastically to even the flattest sections of the show. This tour cast is just middling. And the parental generation (comically depicted onstage) may want to ignore the way Larson's book sentimentalizes AIDS, trivializes heroin addiction and presents a lovable drag-queen angel as the only stable woman in lower Manhattan.

Those things aside, this is one soulful, humanly inspired musical, directed with a loose, unassuming hand by former La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Michael Greif, who collaborated with Larson (who died in 1996 of an aortic aneurysm the night before the New York dress rehearsal). The Civic production is part of the same tour launched at the Playhouse in 1997.

It's tough to care about all that's missing from the Tony-winning book and lyrics when there's so much terrific and terrifically varied theater music to be heard again: the eccentric "Tango Maureen" for two lovers dumped by the same wacky performance artist; the soaring signature ballad "Seasons of  Love"; gritty real-rock numbers "Rent" and "Happy New Year"; Angel's gorgeous love song "Today 4 U"; and the fearfully moving "Will I?" for members of a AIDS-support group.

The touring cast ranges from tiptop (Horace V. Rogers, the vocal standout as Tom Collins, and Michelle Joan Smith as a Madonna-manic Maureen) to OK (Matt Caplan as filmmaker Mark Cohen) to no-way (Cary Shields and Saycon Sengbloh) as Roger and Mimi, respectively

To recap, "Rent" is set in the fast-changing downtown New York neighborhood known as Alphabet City. There, a romanticized bunch of young artists has taken up residence in a big warehouse, trying to make art and make do. Mark -- Caplan plays him as an East Coast Jewish version of Donald O'Connor -- documents it all with his camera, while his AIDS-afflicted roommate Roger, newly off smack, tries in vain to write one last song while popping his AZT.

Also on hand is Mimi, the HIV-positive dancer who can't kick her heroin habit; Joanne (Jacqueline B. Arnold), a Harvard-educated lawyer bound up with Mark's old girlfriend, the bisexual Maureen. One unifying love story belongs to Angel (Shaun Earl) and Tom, however, and it's Angel's loving, enterprising nature that keeps these starving artists from losing hope.

Earl's Angel played all the right breathy and charitable notes as the drag queen, though he didn't distinguish much between the character's everyday male side and the strutting transvestite everyone loves.

Of course, the greatest emotion in this riff on Puccini's "La Boheme" belongs to Mimi and to Roger, who finally gets to write that one (not the greatest) song, "Your Eyes." Unfortunately, there was virtually no chemistry Tuesday between Shields and Sengbloh. Her big on-the-town number "Out Tonight" had none of the oomph it needs, and her vocal pyrotechnics -- odd phrasings and trills and dynamic shifts -- did more to show off her technique than to carry the meaning of these emotion-drenched songs.

It was the ensemble singing and the comic numbers -- especially Smith's Maureen in her "Over the Moon" debacle and Caplan's Mark in "Tango Maureen" -- that carried this particular installment of the worldwide hit.

Now that "Rent's" hype (including magazine spreads in Vanity Fair and elsewhere) has ceased, it's easier to hear Larson's music for what it is -- a great score from an artist who really cared about the musical-theater form. At the Civic, it's well-played by a six-piece combo, well-sung in the choral numbers, if only fitfully moving in the big solos.

Book, music and lyrics: Jonathan Larson. Director: Michael Greif. Set: Paul Clay. Costumes: Angela Wendt. Lighting: Blake Burba. Sound: Steve Canyon Kennedy. Arrangements: Steve Skinner. Musical direction: Boko Suzuki. Music supervision and additional arrangements: Tim Weil. Choreography: Marlies Yearby. Dramaturg: Lynn Thomson. Cast: Cary Shields, Matt Caplan, Horace V. Rogers, Brian M. Love, Jacqueline B. Arnold, Shaun Earl, Saycon Sengbloh Michelle Joan Smith, Haven Burton, Marcus Chaney, Maia Nkenge Wilson, Joshua Greene, Jake Manabat, Enrico Rodriguez, Tricia Young, Marcus Mitchell, Dominique Roy.

Opened off-Broadway: Feb. 18, 1996; New York Theatre Workshop. Opened on Broadway: April 29, 1996; The Nederlander Theatre.

Tony Awards: Best Musical; Best Musical Score; Best Book of a Musical; and Best Featured Actor in a Musical.

Other acclaim: Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Number of performances: 1,625 on Broadway.

Average weekly gross: $500,000.

Number of countries played: 11, including England, Australia, Germany, France, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Japan, Sweden and Finland -- and it's about to open in the Philippines.