by Perry Tannenbaum
Creative Loafing
August 3, 1999

The raffish, artsy renegades of Rent are here, and to tell the truth, they looked a wee bit disoriented on opening night at clean, classy Belk Theater. Perhaps it was the absence of crazed Rentheads wildly screaming in the first two rows. The most fervid Rent groupies reputedly live nomadic lives, following the show from city to city.

Well, it is Charlotte. Did you expect the plutocrats who operate our Performing Arts Center to turn over Founders Hall to a bunch of punk adolescents who had camped out at the box office for those $20 seats?

Scanning those famed front rows before Rent began, I saw only one space cadet and an ominous lack of rowdiness. Watching Jonathan Larson's rock update of La Boheme denuded of all groupie gesticulations, I finally understand what mosh pits are for. With no insanity between us and Rent, we're forced to face the music, which is plentiful but not always wonderful.

More to the point, we're forced to face the performers, who often forget they're characters in a play, giving themselves license to strut and preen like rock stars.

One of the most sizzling numbers in the show, "Out Tonight," originally called for Mimi, Roger's new flame, to put on makeup in her apartment before deciding on an amazingly tight, amazingly sexy dress, transforming herself utterly from the pale little waif who came
knocking pitifully on Roger's door just moments before. These days when the lights turn on Mimi for her showstopping number, she's already undergone metamorphosis. There's no apartment, no mirror. Instead, she slithers and spreadeagles on steel railings like a stripper, not hot but absolutely torrid to trot.

So you can't even be sure you're watching Mimi. Until she begins directing her vamping toward Roger at the end of this rocker, this lewd firecracker could be mistaken for the yet-unseen Maureen, the narrator Mark's former girlfriend, who has been reborn as a lesbian performance artist.

The shorthand storytelling doesn't help. After Collins is rescued by street musician Angel, there's no exposition scene where we learn Collins' new lover is a drag queen. Angel simply appears by Collins' side at Roger and Mark's apartment dressed in his queenly regalia.

But it's hard not to be swept up in the current of Rent when the high voltage is turned on. Besides "Out Tonight," there's a flaming tigress duet between Maureen and her girlfriend, "Take Me or Leave Me." The soulful Collins-Angel love duet, "I'll Cover You," becomes a
touching eulogy when reprised at Angel's funeral. And the hard, cynical edge of Mark and Roger's "What You Own" is the essence of rock

When you're living in America
At the end of the millennium,
You are what you own.

Energy abounds in this youthful romp, so irrepressible that the players end up rejoicing in the face of poverty, AIDS, and death. Puccini's tragic ending is briefly replicated when Roger cries out "Mimi!" at his beloved's deathbed as "Musetta's Waltz" burns through the house on electric guitar. But wait! This is just a near-death episode. One funeral for the evening fills our quota.

Only one problem with the casting, but it's a biggie. Something's wrong in Bohemia when your brooding, guitar strumming hunk has less charisma than your wholesome, bespectacled narrator. Matched up against Yassmin Aler's sweet blazing Mimi, Christian Mena's Roger
seems to disappear. He's no less decisively upstaged by the piercing brilliance of Scott Hunt as Mark.

You wish Horace Rogers and Pierre Angelo Bayuga were given more space as Collins and Angel, they play their colorful relationship so nonchalantly.

You'll find the same nonchalant acceptance in Larson's Bohemia no matter what your sexual orientation, ethnicity, HIV status, or drug addiction happens to be. It's a shame that during his tragically shortened life, Larson's artistry never advanced as far as his attitude. In the title tune that jumpstarts Rent, the exuberance of the music is absurdly at odds with the helplessness of the lyric. And "Your Eyes," the lovesong Roger brings to Mimi's bedside after a year of agonized labor, is an almost laughably empty dud.

So few musicals in the 90s have attempted to mirror America now. It's a far cry from Falsettos, but Rent is a respectable runner-up in this thin category. Rent tells us there is "No day but today," but in its turbulent, confused belly are the embryos of what America's musicals will look and sound like tomorrow.