by Kevin Nance
On Nashville
January 27, 1999

If you're a middle-aged person like me who spends time wonder ing what young people are thinking about these days, you can find the answer or at least some answers onstage at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center.

Rent, the 1996 Broadway rock opera that opened a two-week tour ing engagement at TPAC last night, owes its freshness to its willingness to engage the present-day concerns of young adults: AIDS, sexuality, drugs, poverty, love and art.

And although Rent's portrait of New York's East Village in the 1980s is already dated the street-corner squeegee wielders fallen victim of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's purge, AZT replaced by new- age "cocktails'' it's thrilling, even now, to see the tired old me dium of musical theater still showing some life, wrestling with the big questions, navigating the here and now.

Life, after all, is what Rent is about. Its insistent message, delivered with a potent combination of tenderness and toughness, is "no day but today.'' The struggling artists of Jonathan Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning show learn that nothing not disease, not addiction, not lack of money, not romantic immaturity must keep you from living life to the fullest every moment.

The message is conveyed in a canny score that alternates hard-driving rock passages with more traditional musical-theater anthems. True, the former sometimes run together in a kind of noisy rock-concert stream-of-consciousness; almost all of the most affecting numbers especially Life Support and Seasons of Love wouldn't be much out of place in several more traditional works.

It's also true that Rent doesn't always make narrative sense. Significant stretches, especially in the first act, go on and on without advancing the plot or developing the characters. (The drag queen Angel, for example, takes on major thematic importance, but he/she's given surprisingly little to do.)

But there's no question that Rent is a stirring, often deeply affecting work, and this cast delivers the goods. Standouts include Dwayne Clark as the philosopher Tom Collins his loving relationship with Angel (the sweet-faced Pierre Angelo Bayuga) is at its finest when they're separated by death and Julia Santana as the drug-addicted dancer Mimi. Santana's raspy sing ing voice and seductive gyrations are perfect embodiments of the sacred and profane.

Love, all kinds of it, pours out of every note of Rent. Its struggling couples, gay and straight, live and die for it. You wish them the best, and sing along.