by Dominic P. Papatola
The Times Picayne
April 16, 1999

Here's the thing about bottled lightning: Once the bolt is snatched from the angry sky and stopped up in a glass, it's very tough to keep the electric pulse going for very long.

When it dies, that's physics.  When it lives, well, that's art.

And "Rent" is art. Certainly Jonathan Larson's much-ballyhooed rock opera is flawed art, laden with extraneousness.  It's inconsistent art- a sung-through musical riding on frequently suspect lyrics. and it's over-hyped art, which risks becoming a parody of itself as its sheer profitability undercuts its bohemian themes.

But it is art nonetheless, an observant but unself-conscious thing of beauty and truth that grabs you and takes hold, making you see the world a little differently than when you sat down in the theater.

Larson's retelling of Puccini's "La Boheme," set in New York's east Village, is a gritty amalgam of contemporary issues and timeless themes. Though its cast of characters represents a panoply of urban lifestyles-lesbian performance artists and heart of gold drag queens,   HIV-positive computer-age philosophers and slumming rich kids, S&M dancers and wanna-be musicians- what drives these young people is what drives young people anywhere.   The need for love.  The need to make a difference.And the need to find themselves and their place in the world.

A trio of love stories and a handful of tales of artistic angst are told through a score that's catchy, though not in the manner of traditional Broadway musicals.

Audiences who came of age in the the days of Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cougar, the B-52s,a and Stevie Wonder will feel as if they've touched down in familiar place.  Though "Rent" was conceived in the 1990s, there's something unmistakably mid-80s about Larson's score, from the power-rocking title song to the technobass backbeat of "One Song: Glory" to the fluffy light-pop of "I'll Cover You" to the soaring anthem-rock of "Another Day."

But Larson had solid show-biz sensibilities too: Amid all the synthesizer-and-guitar-heavy tunes boomed at the audience at rock-concert decibel levels are songs that fit more comfortably into the Broadway genre-novelty tunes such as "Tango:Maureen" and the multi-layered, almost Sondheim-esque "Goodbye, Love" among them.

Though the plot copycats "La Boheme" - struggling artists bucking the system and staving off disease while trying to find love and artistic truth - the storyline is cluttered and messy and anything but subtle.

Characters are introduced, generally for the sake of a song, and then forgotten.  A not-very-antagonistic antagonist is not-so-subtly named Benjamin Coffin, and the spiritual center of the young bohemians is a destined-for death drag queen named Angel.  And, though an achingly familiar Puccini motif makes a cameo in the score near the end of the show, the Mimi is this telling of "La Boheme" lives.

The ensemble cast is generally excellent, and does a superior job of blending theatrical craft with the show's rock-concert sensibilities. Pierre Angelo Bayuga stands out with a now heart-warming, now wrenching performance as angel, as does Julia Santana, who gives the strung-out Mimi a fragility masked with plenty of attitude.

Will "Rent"   change the course of musical theater history, as its proponents suggest?  That seems doubtful.  the ground Larson tilled has been worked before- and sometimes to better effect- in rock musicals such as "Hair" and poignant alternative-lifestyle ensemble works including "A Chorus Line."  Though a single show can be a catalyst for such changes, fundamental movement comes from a body of work.  No more music will emerge from Jonathan Larson, who died shortly before "Rent" transferred to Broadway, and if anyone is following in his footsteps, they haven't made a dent in the national landscape in the three years since "Rent" first came to be.

Is "Rent" doomed to become a curio, the way, say, "Hair" has? Since we still live in the play's own time, it's difficult to tell.  Though their dress, their drug of choice and their plague will change, starving artists will be with us forever. That is the truth of "Rent," and that is its best claim to posterity.