by Robert Hurwitt
San Francisco Chronicle
June 8, 2001

The "Rent" went up again in San Francisco on Wednesday. That, it turns out, is very good news. Sure, artists are being evicted, people are dying of AIDS, the streets are crowded with the homeless and the power keeps going out unexpectedly. But this is "Rent" the musical, back in town at the Orpheum Theatre and just about as vibrant as when it played an extended run at the Golden Gate two years ago.

Director Michael Greif's production is as grunge-inventive and dynamic as ever. The cast -- including two from the show's last visit -- is every bit as vital. Five years after it struggled to life in a small East Village theater, just days after the death of its not-quite 36-year-old composer and author, Jonathan Larson's rock musical is still a phenomenon.

Struggling musicians, performance artists, computer nerds, drag queens, filmmakers, homo- and hetero- and bisexuals living and loving with AIDS rock out amid a chorus of the homeless and an HIV-support group. Rock and soul, garage-band tango, ballad and message-machine chorale combine with showbiz savvy in Sondheim protege Larson's deceptively sophisticated score. Unlike "Hair," to which it's often compared, "Rent" rocks with the rhythms of the life it depicts.

It's impressive, and ironic, to see how well it plays a house like the Orpheum after its New York Theatre Workshop incarnation, where it seemed to draw energy from its origins. At Best of Broadway prices, there must be some landlords in the audience cheering the squatters' lustily sung proclamation, "We're not gonna pay LAST YEAR'S RENT!"

But no one who ventures into the theater district can be unaware of the plight of the homeless. Few in this town haven't had their lives touched by the AIDS pandemic. Larson, to his credit, didn't trivialize these issues but made them part of the fabric of the lives and problematic loves of his struggling bohemian artists.

"Rent" is far from perfect. It's as messy as it is ambitious, as sentimental as it is gritty, as confused as it is dynamic. It bowls you over almost as much with its belief in itself as with the considerable artistry of its score -- brightly rendered by conductor-keyboard player Shelley Hanson's small onstage band -- as well as the fervor of its youthful ensemble and the honesty of its anger at the ravages of AIDS and greed.

The story -- which Larson began writing with playwright Billy Aronson (credited for some lyrics) -- is partly borrowed from Puccini's "La Boheme" (that is, from Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica's libretto, based on Henry Murger's mid-19th century short stories), and from Larson's life in the East Village. But "Rent" attempts to juggle more lives more democratically than "Boheme."

Some stories are underdeveloped, but each principal gets at least one showstopper. Roger (a forceful, resonant Jeremy Kushnier), the stymied songwriter, and Dominique Roy's beguilingly sensual, yearning, resilient Mimi, an S&M-club dancer -- both HIV-positive -- meet with heart-stopping desire on the lovely "Light My Candle." Roy brings down the house with a voice as athletic as her bump-and-stretch gyrations on a feral "Out Tonight."

Shaun Earl is just as irresistible as he was two years ago as the buoyant, AIDS-doomed transvestite Angel, brightly teamed in the tender "I'll Cover You" with the broad baritone of Mark Richard Ford as his lover Tom. Matt Caplan is a vital, angst-ridden Mark, the narrator-filmmaker, brilliant in "La Vie Boheme" and outstanding in the hilarious "Tango Maureen" duet with his ex's new lesbian lover (the rich-toned, forceful Jacqueline Arnold). Maggie Benjamin is a sly comic knockout in Maureen's performance art piece "Over the Moon" and astonishingly powerful in her soul-diva showdown "Take Me or Leave Me" with Arnold.

It's all vigorously and inventively staged by Greif as Blake Burba's lights etch sculptural shadows on Paul Clay's grunge set of scaffolds and towering junk sculptures. "One song glory," Roger sings in the number that seems to invoke Larson's poignant fate: "One song to redeem this empty life." There's no doubt that "Rent" is that song (though another Larson musical, "tick, tick . . . BOOM!," opens next week in New York, posthumously adapted by "Proof" playwright David Auburn). But another lyric, from the Sondheim-ish wit of "La Vie Boheme," might serve as a better epitaph: "The opposite of war isn't peace. . . . It's creation."

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