by Carolyn Jack
The Plain Dealer
May 15, 2001

Maybe they call it "Rent" because you don't have to buy it to enjoy it.

Oh, it's an absurd production, all right. Only God and the Pulitzer committee know why it won so many awards. It can hardly even be called theater, much less art. It's shallow, derivative, loud, long, indecipherable, inconsistent, adolescent and, on the whole, pretty much fun.

Jonathan Larson, the show's late creator, does not seem to have had "Saturday Night Live" or MTV on his list of writing credits, but he would have been a natural for either television gig. His 1996 musical, which went to Broadway three months after Larson's death at 36, does a darned good imitation of a music video, with some comedy shtick thrown in.

Based as loosely as rappers' pants on the Puccini opera, "La Boheme," "Rent" is a moving collage of images and sound, a pastiche of scenes that makes overt reference to a whole childhood's array of pop-culture touchstones from Burt Bacharach songs to James Bond movies and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."  Slightly more subtly, it borrows stylistically from such stage and screen works as "Fame," "A Chorus Line" and "La Cage Aux Folles."

For those who missed the national tour's last two visits to Cleveland and weren't at Tuesday's Palace Theater opening in Playhouse Square, the story is, like "Boheme," about impoverished artistic types, here living with AIDS, heroin habits and rather manic-depressive swings of mood in the slums of New York. With their futures in question because of dicey health and explosive temperament, the unorthodox couples of Roger and Mimi (mixed race, addicts) and Maureen and Joanne (mixed race, lesbian) have trouble forming stable relationships despite the good example set for them by Tom Collins and Angel, a gay computer whiz and his campy, drag-queen lover, whose commitment lasts even unto death.

Forget the aura of tragedy, though - Larson's script contains yuks, both intentional and un-, the way Western flatlands contains prairie dogs. They just keep popping up. Maureen, a performance artist hoping to raise awareness about the homeless, arrives on a motorcycle like Meat Loaf's Eddie in "Rocky Horror" and then does an arty piece, vaguely about cows, that skewers the pretentious avant garde in a way Gilda Radner herself could not have bested. And then there's the ending. . . .

Well, it's too hilarious to spoil. Suffice it to say that "Rent" is a hoot from start to protracted finish, with its happiest aspect being a cast and onstage band that are pure dynamite. Though Larson's music amounts to middle-of-the-road pop, it contains some pretty harmonies and anthemic hooks that the cast delivers with clear, blended power and sheer exuberance.

Nearly all the performers are called upon to be gymnastic in their movements as they boil and shimmy around the stage, but Dominique Roy as Mimi must lose 5 pounds at every performance from the acrobatic choreography she sizzles through. She and Mark Richard Ford as Collins stand out as the troupe's most affecting actors as well.

Their show may not last any longer in the artistic firmament than, say, a Stephen King novel or a Madonna single, but there are many worse ways to spend an evening than watching a group of talented, attractive young people have a heck of a good time onstage. Just "Rent" out your brain.