by Roy Proctor
Richmond Times-Dispatch
May 13, 1999

Broadway's smash-hit rock opera, "Rent," now at Richmond's Landmark Theater on the same tour that played Washington's National Theatre 20 months ago, could hardly be more different from "My Fair Lady."

Indeed, its would-be artists and down-and-outers huddling together to survive in the gritty Alphabet City area of New York's Lower East Side are just the sort of people a veteran "My Fair Lady" devotee might cross the street to avoid.

They're also the kind of people with whom today's urban and suburban young -- the theatergoers of tomorrow -- can identify even if they don't share their frequently alternative lifestyles, drug use and HIV infections.

Don't be misled by word that "Rent" composer-writer Jonathan Larson transformed the young bohemians in Puccini's "La Boheme" into the young bohemians who were his Alphabet City neighbors. Larson's 2¾-hour musical throbs with the here and now.

It offers an abundance of soaring arias, to say nothing of duets, trios and full chorus numbers, but this is no picturesque Italian opera. It filters many musical styles through rock idioms, is accompanied by an onstage band and is sung at rock-concert decibels. Its themes of youthful bonding and optimism in the face of adversity recall an earlier rock musical, "Hair," but it has an edge all its own.

"Rent" demonstrates the American musical theater's fierce instinct for self-preservation. If its audience threatens to gray out terminally with worn-out sounds, forms and themes, it reinvents itself with another "West Side Story," "Hair," "A Chorus Line" . . . or "Rent."

Larson focuses largely on three couples. Songwriter Roger (Christian Mena), a former junkie who is HIV-positive and wants to write one great song before he dies, loves Mimi (Julia Santana), who is dying of AIDS and dances in an S&M bar to support her drug addiction.

Maureen (Cristina Fadale), a performance artist who has been the girlfriend of a neighborhood videographer, Mark (Scott Hunt), takes up with her producer, Joanne (Danielle Lee Greaves), instead. And Tom (Dwayne Clark), a former teacher, falls in love with Angel (Pierre Angelo Bayuga), a transvestite.

The 15-performer show comes complete with a villain of sorts, a rapacious landlord (Carl Thornton), and Hunt's Mark functions as our guide as he videotapes the neighborhood and its inhabitants.

The performers were evenly matched and uniformly excellent when this tour played Washington, but numerous cast substitutions have left director Michael Greif's show looking and sounding a bit uneven.

Santana's Mimi leaves nothing to be desired. From her plaintive "Light My Candle" through her sizzling "Another Day" song-and-dance number to her soaring second-act duet, "Without You," with Mena, she sings, acts, dances -- and ultimately dies -- like a dream.

Fadale and Greaves play and sing the lesbians with assurance, and Greaves is especially engaging in her wacky performance-art number near the powerful "La Vie Boheme" finale to Act 1. Clark and Bayuga come off less well. They lack romantic chemistry.

Don't be thrown off by the grubby look of Paul Clay's indoor wasteland of a set. Greif uses it ingeniously, and it benefits greatly from lighting designer Blake Burba's resourcefulness and flair for drama.

If Larson's masterpiece has shortcomings, they lie in the script's occasionally confusing welter of plots and its failure to resolve some of them before show's end.

It's interesting to speculate what kind of pruning and clarification the 35-year-old Larson might have achieved had he not died of an aortic aneurysm just before "Rent's" original off-Broadway previews.

That's quibbling, however, in view of his ability to point the American musical in a new direction. "Rent" offers a thoroughly American answer to the British pop operas that dominated Broadway for so long.

About the sound: The sound system is on its very best behavior, but chances are you won't catch all the words in "Rent," here or elsewhere. You seldom do with an opera. The high volume and hard-driving nature of rock, in which words often get swallowed up, only compound the problem.

That's why the program offers a plot summary as well as a chart picturing the eight main characters and detailing their relationships. Familiarizing yourself with that double-spread should increase your understanding and enjoyment.