by Scott Phillips
The Columbus Dispatch
February 24, 2000

When the curtain rose Tuesday night, the Palace Theatre resounded with the cheers of screaming teen-age girls.

This is not your father's Broadway Series.

The Broadway smash Rent, which also played Columbus in 1998, is packing the house with enthusiastic theater-goers younger than 30. If the opening night's uncharacteristically youthful audience is any indication, theater may have a future after all.

Rent, with a rock-music score and relentless energy, was created with the MTV set in mind. The brainchild of the late Jonathan Larson, it is a contemporary adaptation of Puccini's La Boheme, the achingly romantic 19th-century opera about doomed lovers and artists living in an unheated garret in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

Oh, but things have changed. In Rent, some of the lovers and artists are gay, some are addicted to drugs or dying of AIDS, and all are residents of Manhattan's Lower East Side.

It also is an exhilarating production that richly deserves the cheers.

Part of the exhilaration stems from the athleticism of the ensemble, which gambols about the stage, tirelessly negotiating Paul Clay's dark and dusty platform-and-scaffolding set.

Certainly Puccini would not have known what to make of Larson's Mimi (Saycon Sengbloh), who prances about in blue spandex pants and low-cut black halter.

Sengbloh is exquisitely erotic in Light My Candle, a delightful tease in which Mimi attempts to seduce Roger (Cary Shields), a cynical and depressed songwriter whose HIV infection makes him reluctant to accept her invitation.

As Maureen, the performance artist whose flirtations drive her lover Joanne (Jacqueline B. Arnold) and former boyfriend Mark (Matt Caplan) bananas, Michelle Joan Smith turns in a performance filled with vim and vinegar.

Perhaps the best of an excellent ensemble is Shaun Earl as Angel, the drag queen with AIDS who holds the little group of bohemians together. Earl avoids the egregious exaggerations and stereotyped behavior that plague most stage depictions of drag queens and invests his role with warmth and dignity.

Larson's score ranges from conventional rock and pop to Brazilian tango and Caribbean steel- drum rhythms.

The score shines in the large ensemble numbers, particularly in the first-act finale, La Vie Boheme, in which the community defends its way of life and defies an arrogant developer.

All of this is, of course, a ridiculously romantic depiction of what in reality amounts to poverty and squalor.

But Puccini and protege Larson were incurable romantics, so savor the show's resilient spirit.