by Lawson Taitte
The Dallas Morning News
November 11, 1999

The cast of Rent really cooked Wednesday at the Majestic Theatre. The secret ingredients: finely graded acting and a sound mix that, for once, lets you hear words and music.

The performers look amazingly fresh, given this three-week stand is for many of them the third Rent appearance hereabouts in less than two years. They play the 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner as if it were already a classic.

Jonathan Larson's exploration of life among avant-garde artists on New York's Lower East Side hardly seems the stuff of popular success. Drugs and every variety of sexual experience are taken for granted. Most of the leading characters are HIV-positive, and AIDS serves as a metaphor for the fragility of life in the midst of romantic abandon.

But popular Rent is, thanks mostly to the inspired score. This touring company sings all the numbers, from rock anthems to Sondheimian list songs, with sonorous fervor.

Christian Mena and Julia Santana, familiar faces to area Rent groupies, sound as good as they look as the star-crossed pair based on the leading characters in Puccini's La Boheme. She's a wailing, gyrating nightclub dancer, he a smoldering songwriter depressed over his former girlfriend's suicide. Pierre Angelo Bayuga, too, has a star turn as the soulful drag queen, Angel.

Rent, however, hasn't always seemed this coherent dramatically. For that you can thank the actors with less showy parts. Mark, a filmmaker, narrates the show. Scott Hunt makes every word count - blessedly less ambitious to embody an angry Zeitgeist than to clarify the story and sing the lyrics intelligibly.

Horace V. Rogers also makes a strong impression as Angel's cyber-philosopher boyfriend, Tom Collins. With the saddest role in a show with a lot of dark corners, he makes the most of the pathos without milking it.

Maybe the best news of all is that the touring sound engineers seem to have overcome the nasty acoustics of the Majestic. In the few songs with a loud electric bass, you still can't make out everything. But on the whole this is the first time North Texas audiences actually have a chance to comprehend what's going on.