by Tim Smith
Charlotte.com
August 1, 1999

"As the lights came up after a particularly poignant performance of `La Boheme' at the New York City Opera," a contributor to The New York Times recently reported, "I heard a girl of about 10 sitting directly behind me turn to her mother and say, 'Rent' was much happier.' "

Charlotteans may soon hear comments along that line, considering Opera Carolina presented Giacomo Puccini's "La Boheme" as recently as 1997. Some of those same patrons might also see Jonathan Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning rock opera "Rent" during its two-week run at Charlotte's Blumenthal Center. It opened Tuesday and runs through Aug. 8.

"Rent" fans who have never seen "La Boheme" should consider buying or borrowing a CD of the opera to check out the original source material upon which Larson's musical is based. And opera fans who wouldn't ordinarily consider a rock show should check out "Rent."

It would be instructive for both camps.

It's funny that two of the most successful Broadway musicals in recent years, "Miss Saigon" and "Rent," should owe their existence to Puccini operas. (Almost every Andrew Lloyd Webber musical owes something to Puccini, of course, but he doesn't borrow the plots, only the technique of getting maximum mileage from big tunes.)

What the late Larson accomplished with his defining opus is not unlike what Puccini accomplished when he seized upon Henri Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" as a source for an opera.

Murger's serialized novel of 1847-49 introduced a marvelous assortment of characters caught up in poverty and poetic dreams. Puccini's librettists brilliantly condensed this episodic book into four short acts that serve as snapshots of bohemian life in Paris. Although we never get any detailed information about the people in the opera, we feel as if we know them within minutes of being introduced. More important, we care about them.

In "Rent," we also meet a collection of troubled souls, this time living in lower Manhattan. As in "Boheme," everyone is sketched quite superficially, yet we glean enough about them to feel for them, sympathize with their plights, relate to their foibles and jealousies and fears. That's what good theater is all about.

Larson, who wrote the book and the score, conscientiously set out to parallel the Puccini opus. This process provides plenty of connecting points for "Boheme" fans.

Point-for-point parallels

The first scene in both works, for example, takes place on Christmas Eve. Where Rodolfo and his pals try to get warm by burning a play he has been writing, Roger burns rock posters.

Even some very minor details in "Boheme" find echoes in "Rent."

One of Rodolfo's pals, Schaunard, comes into some money when he is hired as a music teacher by a rich Englishman. He is instructed to play until a parrot in the house dies. Schaunard eventually poisons it.

"Rent's" equivalent character, Angel Schunard, a drag queen and street musician, is hired by a wealthy woman to play music until a neighbor's yapping dog shuts up. Angel eventually tosses the dog out the window of a 23rd-story apartment.

The "Rent" crowd neatly mirrors Puccini's bohemians: songwriter Roger/poet Rodolfo; filmmaker Mark/painter Marcello; performance artist Maureen/gold digger Musetta; landlord Benny/landlord Benoit.

Although Mimi, transformed from a seamstress into an exotic dancer, retains her name, the emphasis changes from heroine in "Boheme" to heroin in "Rent." Drugs are a way of life in this musical. Rarefied opera fans may find such a refashioning of "Boheme" distasteful and disrespectful, but it's neither new nor surprising.

In 1984, filmmaker Ken Russell, working as an opera stage director in Macerata, Italy, set the last act of "La Boheme" in the present, with Mimi turned into a heroin addict, her friends into rock musicians. (It would be interesting to know if Larson was inspired at all by Russell's controversial production.)

Bohemians, by definition, exist on the fringes of society, in discord with the mainstream. Larson's bohemians from New York's sub-Village are very much on a par with Puccini's in the Latin Quarter of Paris. They try to eke out an existence in a cold world, and they'd rather not sell out.

Like "Boheme's" Marcello, who goes from painting on canvases to painting on signboards for a living, "Rent's" Mark reluctantly considers doing film work for tabloid TV.

If this were all there were to the opera-into-musical transformation, "Rent" would be a pretty tame creation.

But Larson took the contemporary aspect one step farther.

Death scenes tell all

The "Rent"-ers, who exchange lovers and needles with equal nonchalance, are caught in the shadow of AIDS. Many of them are infected and face the same uncertainties. This disease is the equivalent of tuberculosis, which claims Mimi's life in "Boheme"; in the 19th century, it was incurable and greatly feared.

(Verdi's "La Traviata," which concerns another tragic, tubercular woman, Violetta, was presented in 1991 by New York City Opera in a production by Nicholas Muni that updated the action to today's Paris and changed Violetta's disease to AIDS. Perhaps this staging, too, had an influence on Larson.)

But TB plays a decidedly minor role in "Boheme," serving more as a theatrical device than a looming metaphor. In "Rent," AIDS is like an unseen character. Larson's sensitivity to the issue is a powerful element in whole show, inspiring some of his best lines ("Will I lose my dignity, will someone care?") and providing some of the emotional weight any Boheme transplant would need.

A measure of the dramatic effectiveness of both works comes in the death scene that each contains. But in the end, I felt cheated of a good cry, because "Rent" cops out: Mimi lives.

Mimi goes through all the motions: She hobbles in, her voice fades, her body sags, her arm falls limply over the edge of her makeshift bed. But before you can even work up a whimper, she's up and at 'em again, singing and dancing and ready to face what comes with her beloved Roger. Turns out she just had a near-death experience.

With the endearing drag queen Angel succumbing to AIDS earlier in the action, "Rent" does meet its "La Boheme" quota for lovely corpses. So why go through the death throes with Mimi?

Colossal anticlimax

Clouding the entire show is a musical issue.

In the opening minutes of "Rent," we learn that Roger is trying to compose a transcendent rock song, to achieve some form of glory. His frustrated search calls to mind another, presumably unintended link with Puccini: The Italian composer, dragged down by cancer, was hard at work on his last opera, "Turandot." Only the final scene remained, the love duet between the newly passionate princess and her intrepid suitor. When his librettists finally submitted words that he felt were just right for this scene, Puccini scribbled a note on the top of the paper: "Find here the characteristic, lovely, unusual melody."

Puccini didn't live to find it.

And Larson didn't live to write Roger's "one great song," either. When Roger starts to serenade the supposedly expiring Mimi, offering her the definitive creation that had so long eluded him, he delivers a tune somehow more forgettable than most of the others in the show.

That letdown, and Mimi's absurd spring-to-life bit, help create what must rank among the most colossal anticlimaxes in the history of musical theater. It drives home what finally distinguishes this show from its operatic counterpart.

"La Boheme" is a masterpiece because Puccini's infallible musical and dramatic instincts elevate the plot, enrich the characters, open up a direct path between their hearts and ours. His sense of melody, harmony, orchestration and, above all, timing never fails.

Larson's lack of musical sophistication holds him back. Had he not died so tragically, felled by an aneurysm the day before the first preview of "Rent" in New York, he might have been able to step back and recognize the musical weaknesses.

A job for Puccini

The whole score falls, thuddishly, into the category of banal rock music. Larson's tunes, supported by predictable harmonic progressions, have a way of meandering aimlessly or turning back on themselves and petering out. They don't soar or get under your skin with the inevitability of, say, a Bruce Springsteen or Sting chorus (or any number of other rock masters).

As a lyricist, Larson is likewise limited. "The moon glows, the river flows, but I die without you" do not really suggest Pulitzer Prize material. Yes, you'll find wit and trend-consciousness in the book, but pruning and tightening would have helped.

"Rent" is certainly commendable for addressing tough issues, reflecting perspectives that have rarely made it onstage, let alone in a musical. AIDS, drug addiction, gay rights, homelessness, abuse of the downtrodden in society, police brutality, even the shallowness of artist agents -- this show touches on them all.

But it would have taken a Puccini to combine so many ingredients into a musically cohesive, totally cathartic experience.