by Neil Novelli
Herald Journal
February 28, 2001

The rock opera "Rent," sponsored by Famous Artists, moved its opening night audience in the Crouse-Hinds Concert Theater with a vibrant, powerful, funny, sometimes raucous story about young love.

Like most operas - including Puccini's "La Boheme," which inspired it - the plot seems meandering and arbitrary set down on paper. If you aren't familiar with "Rent," you might want to get there a bit early to look over the handy program notes.

On the other hand, the score - sometimes driving, sometimes lyrical - and the singers and the dancing really tell the story, and it's told lucidly and movingly.

An added plus is that this cast makes most of the words clear, a lot clearer than they usually are in rock, or in traditional opera for that matter.

The set is a cheerless, gray-black urban clutter of scaffoldings, fire escapes and brick. The only color comes from cheap red folding chairs.

Puccini's opera was based on real people, and one of the most attractive things about "Rent" is that its characters seem like essentially decent people we might know.

Budding filmmaker Mark (Matt Caplan) is the storyteller, and he sees events through his camera even when he has no film. A weedy figure with tousled hair and a striped sweater, Mark seems like a cross between Woody Allen and Charlie Brown.

His musician pal Roger is HIV positive, and in "One Song Glory," Roger yearns to write one great song before he dies.

Love swiftly lightens the mood.

Exotic dancer Mimi (Dominique Roy) reaches out to Roger in "Light My Candle" and later in an athletic dance high on a fire escape invites him "Out Tonight."

Love affairs come and go regardless of gender, color or HIV status.

On a stage often milling with random movement, the show deliberately creates a ragged, uncharted feeling as the characters improvise their lives out of fragments, happenstance and hope.

A lot of hope.

Angel (Shaun Earl), a transvestite, lovingly sings "I'll Cover You" to Tom Collins (Mark Richard Ford), and many of the love songs are clearly carpe diem - seize the day.

Maureen (Maggie Benjamin), a performance artist who dumped Mark, is a pure pain to everybody, including her new lover, Joanne (Jacqueline B. Arnold).

One of the comic high points is Benjamin's spoof of performance art in "Over the Moon" - something about a cow and a moon - aggressively opaque but filled with preachy banalities.

And I never thought I'd hear this in the Crouse-Hinds, but Maureen gets the whole audience to join her act by mooing loudly!

Another comic treat is "Tango: Maureen," sung and danced by Joanne and Mark, who find Maureen annoying.

A lot of the show's attitudes hearken back to the simplistic side of the 1960s. Anybody who offers you a contract and money wants you to sell out; parents who leave anxious messages are philistines from Scarsdale; and love conquers all.

But the show offers more realistic views, too. "Seasons of Love" takes a minute-by-minute count of a year - somebody's last year.

As Angel dies and leaves his hospital bed, Roger lies down in it, just to see what it's like.

A mating dance ends with "It was bad for me. Was it bad for you? It's over!"

Classical opera must have been a lot like "Rent" when it was new. Shocking, fresh, immediate, stirring emotions and perceptions with powerful words and music.