by Marion Garmel
Star News
February 7, 2001

The Rent that returned to Clowes Hall on Tuesday for a repeat run only two years after it first appeared on the Indianapolis Broadway Series is so far superior to the first time around that it's hard to understand why.

The voices are better, the sound is better, the performers are better. It's as though after so many years on the road, this second national company has smoothed out any wrinkles and is now all youthful energy, joy and tears.

This is the musical, developed by Jonathan Larson at the New York Theatre Workshop over a period of four years, that premiered in 1996 off-Broadway and then on Broadway and captured all the best musical awards available that year.

The fact that Larson died of an aortic aneurysm shortly before the opening made it even more poignant. He was just 35 years old.

The musical takes off on Puccini's La Boheme, about poor artists in Paris in the 19th century, with the female lead, Mimi, dying of tuberculosis.

In Larson's updating, the poor artists are in New York City, living in an industrial loft from which they are about to be evicted for nonpayment of rent (hence the title).

They also are protesting the destruction of a tent city for the homeless nearby, so that their landlord can turn the whole neighborhood into a site for his new cyberspace business.

The action takes place over a year, beginning on Christmas Eve. Larson's songs get better with repetition. Maybe it is like opera; the more you see it, the more you appreciate it.

Such songs as Tango: Maureen, when the male and female lovers of performance artist Maureen find they have much in common in dealing with her, seem vital and fresh, along with better known songs such as Seasons of Love and La Vie Boheme.

When Mimi and Roger, the aspiring songwriter who is dying of AIDS, find that they can actually love each other because they both are HIV positive, their beautiful duet, I Should Tell You, brings joy to your heart. And when drugs reclaim Mimi, it's hard not to weep.

Performers move in and out of these roles with no face recognition, but the voices are terrific, and so is the dancing. Shaun Earl's cross-dressing Angel, who looks fabulous in platinum blonde hair, among other costumes, can dance up a storm. Maggie Benjamin as Maureen, when she performs her eccentric piece of performance art, nearly brings down the house. Voices are high and piercing and low and rumbling and they all fit together like a well-tuned machine.

While drugs and AIDS are not poverty and tuberculosis, it's still possible to appreciate Rent for the little miracle it has become. This is a show worth seeing again.