by Christopher Blank
St. Petersburg Times
January 13, 2000

The biggest impact of Rent on the pantheon of Broadway musicals is its ability to draw young people out to see live theater. They came in droves Tuesday night to the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, dressed to the hilt.

High school kids mixed with the college set and Gen-Xers. The older folks -- well -- they plugged their ears and went along for the ride. You can't see this at Oklahoma.

Rent creator Jonathan Larson was correct about popular music being the saving grace of musical theater. The show's high-voltage rock score and lyrics that reference '90s pop culture is an attitude injection Broadway needs. It's the AZT of a dying art form. For young theater aficionados, Rent means hope.

Funny, since the entire plot is driven by a sustained sense of hopelessness. Set in a slummy East Village tenement, the story hinges on a series of sad crises surmounted, in Larson's view, only by love. A curiously touching tableaux in the second act illuminates the romantic gist of Rent.

Three couples embrace amid a glowering metallic set. Stage right: the quarreling interracial lesbian couple Maureen and Joanne. Center stage: Tom Collins holding his dying transvestite lover, Angel. Stage left: The HIV positive couple Mimi and Roger clinging to one another before their love burns out.

Based on Puccini's La Boheme, Rent is Larson's Bohemia, and his message that it is time an audience starts seeing things from a different perspective.

Including musical theater.

From the grungy guitar strains of the first company number to the fired-up gospel of the climactic Seasons of Love, the cast takes to Larson's music like a dream team of rock and R&B singers.

Husky-voiced Joanne (Jacqueline B. Arnold) proved a powerful foil to her wandering lover Maureen, a performance artist sung with impish gusto by Michelle Joan Smith. As the drug-addicted stripper Mimi, Saycon Sengbloh's voice finds physical expression through sensuous dance moves.

Trey Ellett and Scott Hunt as the would-be rock musician Roger and the would-be filmmaker Mark, respectively, put angst and aggression at the forefront of their voices, particularly in One Song Glory, Roger's dream of writing the perfect tune, and What You Own, in which Mark criticizes American consumerism.

Horace V. Rogers portrays a silky-voiced Tom Collins, whose romance with the gutter-saint Angel, sung daintily by Shaun Earl, inspires some of the show's most touching music.

While time will tell whether Rent, inextricably tied to the year 1996, will remain the siren call for a new generation of theatergoers, its sympathies speak to the new millennium. Diversity, reality and a score that rocks: Rent is a gift to musical theater.