by Judith Green
Atlanta J-C
August 11, 1999

The verdict: High-rent show about New York's grungiest.

Inevitably, when it met the big time, the raffish charm of "Rent" was sure to get a little slick, a little overproduced. And yeah, that has happened. But the road show that's at the Fox Theatre this week is the first I've seen since I voted for "Rent" as a member of the drama jury for a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and it's amazing how well it maintains the spirit of its original New York Theater Workshop production.

As everyone knows by now, "Rent" is a rock recounting of the opera "La Boheme." Atlanta Opera is producing the original Sept. 7-12, and all "Rent" fans should see it, just for the fun of recognizing how cleverly the story and characters have been transposed to New York's current Bohemia, "Alphabet City," the part of the East Village that begins at Avenue A.

The Bohemian artists of Henri Murger's 1830 stories are now a filmmaker, a rock musician, a graduate student in philosophy, a transvestite, a performance artist and assorted drug addicts, street people and AIDS patients. And how shocking the scruffy garret-dwellers and girls of easy virtue must have seemed to the proper Parisians of Murger's time, too.

Jonathan Larson, who wrote the book and music for "Rent," took "Boheme" seriously enough to make the translation as fast and sharp as a New York U-turn. His untimely death at 35 (of an aneurysm) the night before the Workshop production of "Rent" was to open only reinforces the message of the show as expressed in its love theme, "No Day Like Today."

According to tradition, the company is full of young unknowns. Some are destined to become known, and others, quite rightly, to disappear from show biz as soon as this run is over.

Among the finds are Scott Hunt, who plays Mark, the filmmaker, aka Marcello in the opera. He's a scrappy, undersized version of Anthony Rapp, who originated the role, and he has a delightfuly dry, droll delivery in "Tango Maureen," the lament he sings with his former girlfriend's new girlfriend (you read that right) when she finds out Maureen has been cheating on her, too. Among the ones to lose is Cristina Fadale as Maureen, who makes a bad performance artist even worse than she is.

A rhetorical question: Do the sound designers for shows such as "Rent" ever listen to their work? Of course not; they're deaf. The sound levels in the Fox are physically assaultive, not that the producers care, but they often turn the lyrics into an unintelligible roar, which you'd think would annoy the audience --- if anyone out there could still hear after the first five minutes.