by Mary Carole McCauley
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
March 11, 1999

As Roger strums his guitar, stage lights throw his giant, inky shadow against the far stage wall, almost up to the ceiling.

The song is even more poignant because it foreshadowed real life. Looming over the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical is the shadow cast by the tragic death of its creator, Jonathan Larson, who collapsed from a brain aneurysm the night before his show opened to rave reviews.

Larson had waited on tables for 10 years as he struggled to bring his modern-day version of "La Boheme" to the stage, and it's easy to make the case that "Rent" is his true, beautiful song.

But how long will the melody last? That question is more difficult to answer.

What makes "Rent" so touching is the sense of urgency that permeates the piece. Larson is writing about the great, big issues we all grapple with: love and death and fate. His refusal to simply skim the surface and entertain his audience invites comparisons to Stephen Sondheim, but the latter's characters express their predicaments with a barbed wit absent in "Rent."

Conversely, that makes Larson's musical seem more authentic; how many of us can summon the energy for the perfect bon mot when we're wrestling with our inner demons?

Yes, the show has problems: The ending is intellectually and emotionally dishonest.

It's difficult to understand the lyrics, partly because the singers often are drowned out by the rock band, partly because they don't always articulate clearly.

That wouldn't matter if this were an opera, where lyrics and plot traditionally play second fiddle to the music. "La Boheme" is performed in Italian, so until the advent of supertitles, most American audiences didn't understand a single word being sung.

And "Rent" clearly has operatic ambitions. The characters reflect on their dilemmas in rock "arias" and duets, and nearly all the dialogue is sung, not spoken. But unlike opera, the most important part of "Rent" is the bond of empathy the audience develops with a ragtag group of lovers and friends. And if we can't understand the lyrics, that bond is loose and incomplete.

The characters themselves -- a heroin addict, a kindhearted drag queen, a yuppie landlord -- aren't stereotypes as much as they're insufficiently known. They rush by us in a blur, just as they rush in and out of each other's lives.

And yet, Cristina Fadale endows Maureen with a mix of silliness and sensuality and has a raucous, raise-the-barn voice. "Over the Moon," Maureen's performance-art piece, is the comic highlight of the show. Danielle Lee Graves gives Joanne, a Harvard-trained lawyer and Maureen's lover, a frazzled devotion and a contralto with as much punch as a jolt of caffeine.

In 1999, the humble purity of Larson's quest makes the structural flaws in "Rent" seem relatively minor. But time tends to be less forgiving, and by 2049, Larson's true, beautiful song may strike audiences as being as quaint and outdated as "Hair," the 1960s box office smash, does today.

Then again, maybe not.

At 1 p.m. Tuesday, at the tail end of a snowstorm, theater patrons began lining up in the Marcus Center lobby hoping for the chance to buy a limited number of $20 tickets to "Rent." The tickets went on sale at 5:30 p.m.; by 5:35 p.m., they were gone.