by Joanne Milani
Tampa Tribune
4/9/98

"Rent'' is a musical that's long overdue. The pop opera now rocking at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center is a celebration of hope, love and youthful ideals.

With creator Jonathan Larson's score of rock, rap, R&B, jazz, hip-hop and pop ballads, it's a show that should have surfaced decades ago. That's because 35-year-old Larson, who died of an aneurysm in 1996 just before "Rent'' went into liftoff, had his ear tuned to real-life music, not "The Sound of Music.''

It's about Bohemian Gen-Xers who are holed up in a freezing East Village loft, determined not to surrender to middle-American mush, heard here in the form of voice mail from worried parents in the suburbs and from corporate types offering filthy lucre.

Love and death are immediate and ever-present in this poverty- ridden world where the AIDS-afflicted poet Roger and the AIDS-afflicted exotic dancer Mimi are drawn together. Joanne and Maureen love each other, as do Collins, a computer-age philosopher, and Angel, a drag queen who dies but not before infecting everyone with more tenderness than ever.

There are show stoppers here, from performance artist Maureen's hilarious, in-your-face act, "Over the Moon,'' to the rafter- shaking love songs like "I'll Cover You'' and the gentler, all- embracing "Without You.''

But this musical's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. With its dynamic, 20-something cast, "Rent'' is a testament to the power of the young.

Here, you learn to love their ideals and their outrageousness in the face of mind-dulling, bourgeois conventions. But you don't connect with them separately.