by David Yonke
Toledo Blade
December 15, 1999

When a musical addresses the big issues and does not get ponderous, when the actors become characters whose humanity grabs you even if their lives may be completely foreign to you, when the lyrics stir your emotions and the music resounds in your head long after the last curtain falls, that's when the stage becomes a transcendent experience.

Rent, the 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical that opened last night at the Stranahan Theater, is a play about love, life, death, money, poverty, principles, and morals. Its cast includes lesbians, homosexuals, bisexuals, exotic dancers, homeless people, and drug addicts struggling to find their place in the world. Its stellar cast and exuberant production manages to cut through all the layers and labels to touch the common denominators of humankind.

Set against a dreary, industrial backdrop of gray concrete and pipes, dimly but deftly lighted with minimal prop changes, Rent is about a bohemian New York artist community whose main characters are faced with eviction for failing to pay a year's rent.

Filmmaker and narrator Mark Cohen (Scott Hunt) points the lens at the world and dreams of completing his movie. When his girlfriend Maureen (Michelle Joan Smith) leaves him for Joanne (Jacqueline B. Arnold), Mark's movie camera offers a convenient way for him to hide from the world. His roommate, Roger (Cary Shields), meanwhile, has become a recluse since his girlfriend committed suicide.

It's a tough scene for an audience to walk into but Mark and Roger immediately seem real to the crowd. They are products and they are victims of the progressive, morally confused '90s.

Hunt, who possesses a smooth tenor voice and a glint from behind his black-framed glasses, provides narration with a newsman's touch spiced with witty one-liners.

They have no heat in their loft, he explains, but there's a wood-burning fireplace - a metal garbage can.

Roger, played with an artist's sensitivity by Shields, who shows off a strong vocal range, is reluctantly drawn out of his shell by the vivacious Mimi, played with fiery sensuality by Saycon Sengbloh, a dynamic performer who is almost eclipsed in one scene by her metallic blue skin-tight pants. She slowly wins Roger's heart but loses ground to her drug addiction.

An early highlight is when Mark runs into Joanne, Maureen's latest lover, and they do the Tango: Maureen, dancing nimbly as they fire off comments and questions to each other about their mutual love interest.

Angel, played by Enrico Rodriguez, and Tom Collins, played by Horace V. Rogers, add more coals to the mix of alternative love and lifestyles.

Angel is a flamboyant drag queen and Horace is an intellectual, and their true love catches fire and burns brightly throughout the show as sort of a benchmark for all the squabbling lovers.

The cast of Rent makes every line and every lyric by the show's creator, Jonathan Larson, hit their marks.