One song, glory.
The critical acclaim that Jonathan gained after his death for RENT.
5. Review in The Daily Telegraph
6. Review in The Evening Standard
8. Matthew Gayle's closing comments
1. The Guardian
"Rent is overdue. More than two years after its New York premiere and the almost simultaneous death of its
creator Jonathan Larson - it finally makes it to London. Once you strip away the hype and hysteria, you find a
genuinely enjoyable anthem to modern youth: a touch sentimental and self admiring but full of melodic invention.
The weakest part of Larson's show is its book. Everyone knows it transposes Puccini's La Boheme to New York's Lower
East Side but, as a story, it hardly adds up. Songwriter Roger is seduced by Mimi, a showdancing, HIV-positive
drug addict. Teacher and vagabond anarchist Tom Collins likewise falls for deeply caring drag queen Angel. Meanwhile
aspiring filmmaker Mark, whose lover has deserted him for a lesbian partner, not only tapes the lives of these
bemused Bohemians but also the attempt by an old friend to evict them from their apartment block. Fortunately the
programme provides a plot synopsis and even a picture guide to who's in love with who. Even so, I found it hard
to work out whether the artists had really been evicted, why Mimi kept shuttling between her old and new lovers
and, at the last, how she managed to comeback from seeming death in time for the final chorale. But, if Larson
was a lazy librettist he was a genuinely talented composer and, as far as one can hear, a good lyricist. The most
rousing number is La Vie Boheme which hymns, after the style of Hair, everything outre, unorthodox and parentally
scorned. But he also writes powerful romantic songs including a deeply Sondheimite one, Without You, in which love
is defined by a series of negatives. I was drawn to a pleasantly polemical number which attacks America at the
end of the millennium as the land where "you are what you own". It is a highly sentimental show: it records,
for instance, the death of the flamboyant Angel with moving simplicity and then spoils it by swathing him with
fulsome tributes. It is not above self-mythologising as if it is presenting us with a portrait of an entire generation.
But there is no denying Larson's extraordinary musical talent and the sense of loss that accompanies his breakthrough
achievement. Michael Greif's production also preserves a sense of rough, workshop spontaneity miles removed from
the usual heartless showbiz slickness. The set is not much more than a brick wall and a junk-mountain that looks
like a grounded Alexander Calder mobile. The cast is also genuinely engaging: most especially Anthony Rapp as the
detached Mark, Wilson Jermaine Heredia and Jesse L Martin as, respectively, the drag queen and his adoring lover,
and Krysten Cummings as the rump-flaunting Mimi. I would be wary of doling out the superlatives. I don't believe
there was ever a first-rate musical that didn't have a good book. But Rent undeniably has musical talent and energy
and, even if it doesn't move one like its source, is worth collecting."
"Rent in New York was not so much a musical as a phenomenon: the little show with a big conscience and a bigger heart that waltzed off with every award. A rock rewrite of La Boheme in which tuberculosis has become HIV and Puccini's Paris is traded in for New York's alphabet city (think London's cardboard city), the plot follows the contemporary struggle between a group of gay and straight friends and lovers failing in and out of love. Over the course of a year they struggle with their emotions and face the dilemma of being artists without money in the age of Aids. Its heart is not so much on its sleeve as tattooed on to its skin. It has been hailed as the saviour of the musical but despite the sincerity and nobility of its concerns, too much of the show is laudable for its attempt rather than its realisation. This is hardly surprising given that Jonathan Larson, who wrote the book, music and lyrics, died after the dress rehearsal of the inaugural production. Since then, the piece has acquired hallowed status. Yet despite a huge marketing campaign with everything that producer David Geffen could throw at it, including padding Stevie Wonder on to a bonus track, the cast album hasn't done the business. Musically few of the songs stand proud of their dramatic context. That ought to be a tribute to the show's power but the major criticism is that real drama is exactly what it lacked. The director Michael Greif is so concerned we should feel every last ounce of the characters hope and pain that he herds his company and spreads them across the front of the stage to exhort us to understand the emotional content. The second half kicks in just this fashion with the company lining up at the footlights to sing the anthem "Seasons of Love". In many ways it is one of the show's best songs, a tight lyric about measuring out your life built around a lightly swung ballad filled out with flying harmonies. It is also an utterly shameless piece of begging for applause. It suddenly hits you: this is more like a staged concert of a concept album with one too many outtakes from a Sting album. But, and it's a big but, the passionate commitment of the cast is never in doubt. When the London production was first announced there were mutterings about the unsuitability of English actors for such raw emotionalism. As it turns out the four New Yorkers reprising their roles find themselves mostly in excellent company. Oddly for a show which has been sold on its rock credentials, with the exception of the excellent "Living in America", several of the most successful songs are far more soft-centred and traditional than adherents would have you believe. Too often the pumped up guitar sound forces the lyrics to become similarly overblown, which is a particular problem as lyrics are Larson's weakest point. There is also far too much unleavened plot being sung to one another leaving too little space to let an audience in. Instead, you sit back and admire the energy rather than being truly moved. Krysten Cummings is sensational as Mimi, pawing the stage like a panther, singing the place down and throwing herself at her material as if her life depended on it, which of course it does. If you go determined to succumb to the cast and their all American heart, you'll love it. Yet as soon as the pace begins to flag (halfway through the first act), you begin to feel the flaws."
"When I jostled through the well-dressed throng, past the Rent t-shirts, mugs and toys, and into a stately Broadway theatre for a performance of Rent itself, I must confess to having felt a few doubts. Hadn't Jonathan Larson's rough-theatre updating of La Bohème, created on and for off-off Broadway, become a piece of cult slumming or garret chic? And hadn't the young composer-librettist's death a few months earlier added a certain sentimentality to the hype? As inadvertent appeals for the sympathy-vote go, succumbing to a heart attack on the very brink of Broadway takes some matching. As I sat amid an even smarter crowd in a still posher theatre for the show's London premiere last night, I strove to be more forgiving and occasionally succeeded. There are a few genuinely striking episodes, notably a long number in the Christmas snow in which druggies plead for smack, horse and blow, and homeless people launch into a counter-cultural carol: no sleigh bells, no yule logs, no Santa Claus, no holly, no loose change, "no room at the Holiday Inn". But that seemed angrier and more abrasive on Broadway. The show may variously be seen as a Lower Depths for the Lower East Side, Puccini coarsened up for the 1990s, and a Hair for today's rock cognoscenti. But is it altogether a recommendation to compare it with Galt MacDermott's shaggy-locked love-in? Aids, landlordism, redevelopment and poverty menace Larson's Bohemians in rather the way Vietnam and army barbers menaced the hippies of Hair. But as a recent revival showed, that musical has its slack, desultory, self-pityingly mawkish and paranoid aspects. Much the same is true of Rent. Significantly, the plot is paraphrased in the programme. Maybe there would be greater narrative clarity if so many of Larson's lyrics were not drowned by the rhythmic clatter and often monotonous crash of Larson's music, or if Paul S. Clay's set (junk sculpture, grotty chairs, and bits of orchestra) made it easier to know where and when we are in the drafty loft where the musical mainly occurs. As it is, it's hard to be vastly concerned about the tangled loves and fates of the brash, sour musician Roger, or the doomed S&M dancer Mimi, or the gamin transvestite Angel, or the nerdish narrator Mark, or the entrepreneurial Benny, who is evil enough to try to charge the assembled drop-outs and swingers a bit of rent, thus causing consternation in the corridors and riots in the streets. Adam Pascal's Roger and Krysten Cummings's Mimi, though lacking in any subtlety or complexity, are among those bringing energy to the proceedings; but I cannot say that they or the rest of Michael Greif's cast left me inclined to buy Larson's conclusions, which are unexceptionable but unexceptional. Mistrust mainstream America. Measure your life less in terms of hours and minutes than of love given and received. As the closing number puts it, "there's no day but today". Yet the musical continues to run and run in America and, judging by the screams and screeches of delight that last night greeted even some spoof mothers haplessly phoning their recalcitrant kids, will do so here too. But is it really a lot more than a disingenuous and slightly callow exercise in nostalgie de la boue, which purports to knock the cruelties of New York while enjoying its mess and muddle? I don't think so."
4. Review in The Daily Mail
"The latest rock musical is really just like the first. Rent, a sensation in New York these last two years,
has opened here in the same theatre as Hair 30 years ago. And sometimes you have to pinch yourself you are not
watching the same show. Which is to take nothing away from the vigour and poignancy of this tough and touching
relocation of Puccini's La Boheme in New York's East Village. The community of artists includes Mimi the stripper
in a low dive, Roger the songwriter and Mark the film-maker. They are all waiting for a break-through in a community
in crisis where rents are high but not as high as the debtors. And the group is being decimated by Aids, not tuberculosis.
Sorry to sound so cheerful. But bear in mind the author of this show - book, lyrics and music - had worked on it
for seven years and died unexpectedly, of an aortic aneurism the night before the first off-Broadway preview in
January 1996. Like Hair, Rent is a tribal protest musical, a supreme summation of an era rather than a foreboding
of much more to come. So Larson's death, while tragic, is also a perfect accidental factor in a show about aspirant
artistic activity. Larson's loss has been missing his own success and his gain missing the unedifying squabbles
over copyright and slices of profits that have ensued. Still, none of this spoils the innocence and roughness of
an event covering one year, from Christmas to Christmas, among the friends, neighbours and bothersome parents (bawling
only down the telephone). A fine quartet of the original cast have carried Larson's triumphant flame into London:
Anthony Rapp as the bespectacled narrator Mark; bottle-blond Kurt Cobain-like rocker Adam Pascal as Roger; sympathetic
Jesse L Martin as a stricken teacher; and the sensational Wilson Jermaine Heredia as the divine young drag queen
Angel. These last two form a doomed love duet alongside those of Roger and Mimi (Krysten Cummings) and of large-in-charge
black lawyer (Jacqui Dubois) and the hilariously nutty performance artist Maureen (Jessica Tezier, the night's
big discovery). You enter the theatre to see what looks like a crashed helicopter: A random art work of tangled
steel and film reels that lights up as a brutalist Christmas tree. A band of five punches out an eclectic, often
gloriously inspired score of fragmented Nineties sounds: Rock, salsa, tango, heavy metal, blues. The tribal lines
of solidarity are intensely moving and effective. In Hair they protested a war. Here it is rents and the cruel
cropping of a generation. Unforgettable songs include One Song Glory (before I die), Santa Fe (about getting a
new life), Out Tonight (Mimi descending on Roger like a sex-starved tigress in her shiny bondage gear), I'll Cover
You (an affidavit of love), the shimmeringly simple Without You and the pounding What You Own. Michael Greif's
production is not aimed at the Stephen Sondheim sophisticates - though Sondheim was a great champion of Larson
-but will appeal to anyone who treasures freshness and spontaneity in this irresistible young man's rush of a musical
memorial."
"It's a cruel thing to say, but Jonathan Larson's death just before Rent opened in New York two years ago
was a brilliant career move. It ensured that his teeth-rottingly sentimental rock opera about life among the avant
garde artists, Aids victims, junkies and the dispossessed in Manhattan's East Village was treated with frankly
preposterous reverence. The show, a hip contemporary updating of Puccini's La Boheme, quickly became a showbiz
legend, especially since Larson's own life and death as a struggling composer so closely mirrored the stories of
his characters. Even that alleged butcher of Broadway, Frank Rich, went all mushy about Rent, while others hailed
the musical as a breakthrough of breathtaking originality. In fact it is gently similar to Hair, which opened all
of 30 years ago - and which, by a strange coincidence, also had its British premiere at the Shaftesbury. Like Hair,
Rent contains a few good rock songs and an intolerable amount of emptyheaded, right-on pseudo-philosophising. For
both these reasons it appeals to the young and faintly disaffected. Rent, however, is emphatically not a show for
grownups, though Larson's eclectic, rock-dominated score, with tinges of gospel, soul and blues, is often genuinely
enjoyable, and superbly delivered by a cast that includes some of the original American stars. Unfortunately the
trite and mawkish lyrics constantly get in the way of a good time, as they platitudinously inform us that love
is better than hate, tolerance is nicer than bigotry, love of money is the root of all evil and dying young of
Aids can be an awfully sad business. The action, though there is remarkably little of it and what narrative there
is tends to be clumsily handled, is set in the loft apartment of Mark, our geekish narrator, and Roger, a musician
and former junkie whose girlfriend recently committed suicide because both she and Roger had Aids. Roger, however,
is soon falling in love again, this time with Mimi, who despite being an HIV-infected heroin addict looks absolutely
beautiful, has a perfect complexion and dances up a storm at the local S&M bar. It's that kind of show. While
pretending to deal with gritty subject matter, Rent constantly sanitises it. Indeed after watching this show you
might decide that it would actually be rather fun to be cold, broke and terminally ill. These bohemians have so
much more fun than the boring straight community who are leadenly satirised throughout. Being rude about Rent is
a bit like drowning a cuddly kitten, for the show is so desperately determined to be cute and winning, with every
sexual minority slickly catered for. Yet its sugar-coated dishonesty strikes me as being repellent, never more
so than in the final scene when Mimi seems to snuff it only to come back to life so the show can end on a spuriously
uplifting, send-the-punters-home-happy anthem about living for the day. It is at moments like this that one begins
to despair of the musical. There is, however, no doubt that Michael Greif's production is performed with real heart
and vitality by an exceptionally accomplished cast. Krysten Cummings occasionally brought a lump to even this old
cynic's throat as a Mimi who is both sexy and vulnerable, while Adam Pascal plays Roger with a brooding sense of
hurt. There is a fine performances too from Jesse L. Martin, whose song of grief after the death of his drag-queen
lover is one of the few moments when the show becomes moving rather than manipulative. I have a horrible suspicion,
however, that the show's grotesque sentimentality won't prevent Rent from becoming a huge hit in post-Diana Britain."
6. Evening Standard Review
"The West End musical stage recovered a long-lost youthfulness last night when Rent made a triumphal transatlantic
cross-over from Broadway. Jonathan Larson's smash-hit rock-opera, which famously updates Puccini's La Boheme to
Nineties Manhattan, when Aids not tuberculosis is the familiar, fatal syndrome, succeeds in making Andrew Lloyd
Webber and all his middle-aged works look more old-hat than ever. As Hair captured the spirit of the hippier young
Sixties, so Rent, with its politically correct troupe of homeless artists, HIV-infected lovers straight and gay,
junkies, lesbians drag queens sings a dark romance for our harder times. Of course Rent sounds suitable stuff for
mockers of the modish. And it's true Larson, who died at 36 of an aortic aneurysm, loses hold of his diffuse narrative
threads. A main plot-line, involving efforts to evict homeless young people from a Manhattan loft drifts nowhere
much. But the fraught love-affair flaring between Roger and Mimi, whose heroin drug habits have precipitated them
into the ghastly fix of Aids, is the musical's tremendous, emotional making. Paul S. Clay's bare-bones design,
with its tower of industrial junk, platforms and band on stage, gives the show a look of low-key, cut-price austerity
- despite the blaze of funky costumes and T-shirts on display. But Larson's rock score, with its anthems and ballads,
its rhythm and blues, and bitter-sweet lyrics which hardly stoop to sentimentality, is a towering attraction. He
deals with the dilemma of young people who suffer the inexorable stress of waiting for the illness and death Aids
will bring. The music for a band of five - keyboard and guitar striking plangent notes of lament - shimmers with
regret and longing. The musical's first half laboriously meanders with Anthony Rapp irritatingly bland as the narrator.
But the first encounter between Adam Pascal's Roger, the songwriter who sings of his longing to produce just one
great song "before the virus takes hold" and the teenage Mimi, sparks real erotic excitement. Her propositioning
Light My Candle captures a mood of sexy, wistful yearning more powerfully than any West End musical song this decade.
And Pascal, the show's sexy star, is its dynamic, focus - a lyrical power-house of anger, dejection and eros. It's
Larson's lyrical ability to convey the cruel romance of loving when beset by Aids that gives Rent its emotional
appeal. There are 10 remarkable minutes of vintage rock-opera when Krysten Cummings, always voluptuous and plaintive
as Mimi, sings the exquisite lament Without You - for Roger. On a hospital trolley close by, her friend Collins
cradles the body of his dying lover, Angel, a drag queen now dressed-down to his original gender. The requiem song
for Angel, to whom Wilson Jermaine Heredia has given glamour, high heels and lashings of flash femininity, brings
all the loft inhabitants mournfully together. When director Michael Greif, whose production maintains a mood of
bustling momentum, gathers these sexually, racially, social diverse and young characters to mourn for Angel the
musical's fresh, special draw is vividly apparent. Rent celebrates a romantic view of outsiders finding communality
in their troubles. But there's no real happy ending. Mimi's sudden death-bed recovery is only meant as a short-term
remission - the final song's an instruction to enjoy each day as if it's the last. This finale and the musical
itself will haunt me beautifully."
"Adding to the current avalanche of musicals in London comes this smash hit from Broadway. It's 35-year-old author Jonathan Larson died just a few days before It opened - a clever career move that's clearly paid off. The show's touchy-feely triumph over tragedy positivism, made the show - a grunge musical with a large young cast - a cult hit among young New Yorkers. It's even been hailed as the modern equivalent of Hair, that dandruffy happening of 30 years back. This story updates Puccini's opera La Boheme and plonks it down in New York where a bunch of creative folk live amidst the hobos, poverty and squalor of the East Village. In the. original, Mimi has tuberculosis. Here she's an HIV positive dancer. Rudolfo is now called Roger, a struggling rock musician. They care, share, lurve and suffer together through 30 songs. What gives the show it's zap is its wild blend of musical styles -acoustic, thrash rock, even calypso. A handful of scenes have a brilliant vitality that you'll find nowhere else in a West End musical. Star of the show is unquestionably Krysten Cummings' Mimi, a lithe new Tina Turner. Underneath the street cred, Rent is sincere, syrupy and it goes on forever. It's so relentlessly youthful you come out feeling about 80 years old. In a small New York fringe theatre I bet it was strikingly original. In this plush West End barn it's hip credentials have got lost somewhere."
8. Matthew Gayle's Closing Comments
"I still believe we have a vibrant show, but the problem is that a lot of people didn't really understand what it was about and it didn't really appeal to the traditional musical theatre-goer. We always struggled with attracting the traditional audience for musicals and we never really did group sales - and for most musicals nearly 40% of their income is from those. We had some incredible weeks but they tended to coincide with college holidays... It never really took off here although it was enormous in New York. There was always a doubt that it would travel. The problem was that it was really a first draft, and if Larson hadn't died then he could have reworked it. I am surprised it lasted this long and I think it's possible that a lot of the audience was made up of US tourists who couldn't get in to see it in New York."
Matthew Gayle, General Manager of RENT London