Byron Woods
Raleigh News & Observer
April 29, 1999

Late 1980s downtown New York bohemia met Raleigh's turn-of-the-century landed gentry Tuesday night. At this point at least one thing is clear -- neither entirely knew what to make of the other. Puzzled-looking older couples in the audience surveyed their programs and each other at inter-mission, in a largely unsuccessful quest for clues. Meanwhile, the mischievous grins and cocked eyebrows of younger theatergoers more plugged into the world of contemporary art indicated a combination of guilty pleasure and downright disbelief that "Rent" even made Raleigh.

The opening night performance of the 1996 Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical couldn't quite be termed a collision between worlds, since performance and audience both stayed, on the whole too respectfully, on their chosen sides of the proscenium arch. More's the pity: where New York's Nederlander Theater production evoked a bohemian convention in which the boundaries between audience and stage repeatedly blurred, a comparatively subdued night in Raleigh bore more resemblance at points to an anthropological study than an abandoned celebration of "la vie boheme."

All right, perhaps that takes the point a bit too far. Still, Tuesday's show indicated the degrees to which opening night, unfamiliar acoustics -- and an unfamiliar audience -- can limit the energy and the success of a performance.

Jonathan Larson's comic, poignant resetting of Puccini's "La Boheme" celebrates the lives and times of poor artists, struggling to survive in New York. Where tuberculosis plagued Paris of the 1830s, AIDS is decimating the New York arts world. In both, artists struggle with their commitments to their craft, their lovers, their parents and themselves.

Each must decide. Sell out, like cyberartist turned real-estate mogul Benny (Carl Thornton)? Perhaps just pack it in, trading the cold and poverty for an improbable afterlife in Santa Fe -- seductively conveyed in the soulful, show-stopping song of the same name. Withdraw from the world in general, as the depressed Roger (Christian Mena) has? Hide behind art, to keep from ever risking love and loss again? Or is it possible to opt for another response to the unfairnesses of life -- one more critical, more creative?

Larson's kinetic score explores these and other questions in an extended celebration of living and dying artists. Exultational songs like "La Vie Boheme" and "Rent" are commingled with the dry comic observations of "Christmas Bells." We find moving responses to the temporality of life in the "Another Day" and "Seasons of Love," before the indictment contained in "What You Own."

Pierre Angelo Bayuga conveyed the dignity and exuberance of the aptly named drag queen Angel, while Dwayne Clark made an appropriately pensive Tom Collins. Other principal roles lacked energy, including Julia Santana as dancer Mimi, Christian Mena as songwriter Roger and Scott Hunt in the role of Mark, the documentarian of this strange subculture.

I'll conclude we saw a colder opening night than most and predict warmer weather -- on stage and off -- for this production's occupancy in Raleigh.