by Marion Garmel
Star News
March 24, 1999

Rent is a curious phenomenon.

The four-time Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical sold out its entire one-week run at Clowes Hall, but there were a lot of intermission walkouts at Tuesday's opening night performance.

Granted these were mostly older folk, well-dressed middle-agers and suburban couples whose curiosity probably got the best of them. They came to see what Rent was like, and then they left.

Because, truth to tell, this is a young person's musical with passion, sex, drugs and AIDS all tied up in a tender story about young people finding love among the ruins of New York's East Village.

The first act is set on Christmas Eve; the second act highlights the events of the following year.

The eight principals, whose personalities are developed in song and rhythmic dialogue as the musical progresses, share equal billing, and each has a major song. Begin with Scott Hunt's nerdy Mark and his roommate Roger (Christian Mena), dying of AIDS, who wants to write one good song on his guitar before he goes.

Add sexy Mimi (Julia Santana), who tempts Mark out of the loft; philosopher friend Tom Collins (Dwayne Clark), also dying of AIDS, and the angelic Angel (Pierre Bayuga), a cross-dresser who becomes Tom's protector and makes a terrific female Santa.

Spice with Joanne (Danielle Lee Greaves), the rich attorney with diplomat parents, who is the latest lover of Maureen (Cristina Fadale), the performance artist who just dumped Mark. Stir in Benjamin Coffin III, the one-time roommate of Roger and Mark's, who married rich and now owns their building and the homeless lot next door, and you have a heady brew.

The plot involves Benny's plans to tear down the building and use that space plus the lot to build a cyber arts studio, and everybody else's efforts to keep him from doing it. All the while people are freezing, starving and slowly dying. When they find love, it's like a miracle.

All of the scenes are played out in a vast industrial loft area, a steel-gray set full of grids and ladders and shafts of dusty light. The only color comes from a white table with white and red chairs, a Japanese lantern moon, and the clothes the performers wear.

When they're all on stage, singing and dancing, it's like a kaleidoscope of humanity has descended on a mechanical world.

The ensemble numbers tend to have a sameness about them -- high energy, loud and sometimes lost in the miking. But Jonathan Larson, who wrote everything -- the music, the lyrics, the book -- had a clever, fertile mind and could switch from love duets to rap to rock.

Then there is Maureen's Over the Moon, a performance piece that contains one of the unlikeliest lines in the show, delivered to a fork and spoon that want to join her in an escape from the desert of Cyberland by jumping over the moon.

"Not in my back yard, utensils, go back to China."

Any musical that can accommodate that line has to be special.