Downtown Arias

I expect that anyone with ears to hear and a heart to feel will be floored by Rent, the late Jonathan Larson's rock-salsa-reggae-ballad musical that uses Puccini's opera La Boheme as a launching pad and scorches with its rocket thrust. As an opera nut, I'm also convinced that my fellow psychotics--and those saner theatergoers who merely tolerate the existence of opera or might be curious about it--can get from Rent some notion of how Puccini's biggest success hit its first audiences a century ago (although it inordinately soothes today's customers). Let's not exceed the limits of "some notion." In 1896, it was enough of a jolt to operagoers, mainly used to variously elevated and distanced stories of love, fun, and death, to be confronted with garreted painters, poets, and their lovers in days and nights of bliss, poverty and death. The jolt might have bruised sensibilities more had Puccini's librettists not so heavily sentimentalized their grittier literary source, Henri Murger's Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, and had the composer not fed generations of great voices with such deliciously oozing tunes.

There's no question of "some notion" with Rent. If it was inspired to some extent by Puccini's La Boheme, that extent couldn't have reached beyond a skeleton of plot structure, suggestions for characters and their names, and a couple of musical hints. As you must have heard by now, Rent moves the Boheme milieu from the Latin Quarter of 1830s Paris to New York's East Village of today. Incidentally, Larson patterns his show's time span on Pagliacci composer Leoncavallo's La Boheme, rather than Puccini's, by ending the story on Christmas Eve, exactly a year after it begins. Leoncavallo's opera, I should add, is far less popular, but also less weepy, more Murgeresque, and more musically peppery than Puccini's.

The real inspiration of Rent had to be composer-lyricist Larson's own perception and gut reactions to the urban life lived and left by men and women he knew. In fact, his own story could, shall we say, "inspire" another drama. He had several shows produced on various small stages and on TV. He supported himself as a SoHo waiter. He won some awards, including one from his mentor, Stephen Sondheim. Rent turned out to be his breakthrough, but hours after the final dress rehearsal, he died of an aortic aneurysm at age 35.

Fatal sickness focuses the plots of both Puccini's opera and Larson's. (Yes, technically Rent is a genuine opera, albeit for miked pop voices.) But in La Boheme only Mimi is sick (of TB) and dies. In Rent, half the principal characters are HIV-positive. And if we move the comparisons into music, Puccini's opera may ooze, but Rent explodes.

The fuses lit by the 15 cast members and the five-member onstage band run sometimes slow, sometimes fast, depending on the moods and tensions of Rent's 33 numbers. Five of those numbers are parody-recitatives of voice-mail messages from parents. For this and other, more central dramatic aspects of the show, I refer you to Michael Feingold's eloquent and entirely truthful rave review in the February 20 Voice. What first struck me about the singing actors was how fast they dislodged my opera-nourished prejudice against miked musical theater. To see all those faces decked out with little head-to-mouth gadgets was, at first, to see so many switchboard operators scampering about. Within a very few minutes, however, the onslaught of words and music made me stop wondering why the young women, as well as the men, were wearing mustaches. Of course, most of this century's pop music would be ridiculous without mikes. (Frank Sinatra's and Ella Fitzgerald's mastery for the most obvious examples, always depended as much on their manipulations of distance from the mike as it did on their actual voices.)

To make Puccini's healthy Rodolfo into a potentially very sick songwriter named Roger certainly raised the story's emotional ante, and Adam Pascal sings Roger's first solo, "One Song Glory," with shadowed bravery, highlighting a phrase like "before I go" with a reminder of Larson's fate as well as Roger's fear. Note also how the melody seems to try to avoid downbeats wherever possible. Mimi--the first of Puccini's gentle, doomed heroines (the amoral Manon Lescaut doesn't count)--is now the just-as-doomed, just-as-loving, but temperamentally hot Mimi Marquez and her music never spares the heat, particularly as sung and flung by Daphne Rubin-Vega. Puccini's first aria for Mimi begins, "They call me Mimi." Larson saved those words for the very end of the first Roger-Mimi duet ("Light My Candle"), with its chronic vocal hesitations.

The secondary, volatile pair of Puccini's lovers--café singer (et cetera) Musetta and painter Marcello--are now part of a twice-as-volatile triangle, the third side, Joanne (the invincibly sassy Fredi Walker), begin the more than occasional lover of performance artist Maureen (Idina Menzel) and an occasional confidante of aspiring filmmaker Mark (the phenomenally energetic Anthony Rapp). Mark and Joanne's song and dance (in two senses of the phrase) raids through minor and major keys (C minor to F major, for instance) just as its dancing singers careen all over the stage. Menzel pulls off a wickedly oily performance piece that might put Laurie Anderson in litigation, or, more likely, stitches.

Larson's most moving love story belongs to the counterparts of Puccini's philosopher Colline and musician Shaunard: teacher Collins and female impersonator Angel. As Collins, Jesse L. Martin sings to Angel the show's warmest, most fervent song, "I'll Cover You" (the meter broadening midway and key rising with the emotion), and, after Angel's death, reprises it with a choral backing that floods the audience with grief. Wilson Jermaine Heredia has acted and sung Angel with such a bravura mixture of sleaze and sincerity that you wonder if the grave could keep him down. After all, in the second-act finale, just as the supposedly dead Mimi wakes up again in Roger's arms. That finale and the vaster, more rampaging one for the first act, not to mention the early-evening title number (with its drivingspeed glissando-dive end), are the real spine of the show. One of Rent's strongest limbs is the second-act opener, "Seasons of Love," which breaks out of its rather tight, dotted F-major melody and bursts up into higher choral flights while remaining in the same key. These numbers erupt not only manically but also feelingly. Supported by the leader-keyboardist Tim Weil, bassist Steve Mack, guitarists Kenny Brescia and Daniel A. Weiss, and drummer Jeff Potter, those 15-singer-dancer-actors keep their grip on you weeks (at least) after you've left the theater.

There have been varyingly successful attempts in the past to "translate" Puccini's opera to something like our place and time. Director Mark Lamos did it successfully in 1990 at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown. The Bastille Opera in Paris has recently wound up a run of Jonathan Miller's evidently less expert Great Depression version. In New York a few weeks ago, DiCapo Opera Theater gave actor-director Austin Pendleton a try at modernizing the sensibility, if not the milieu, of Puccini's people. Pendleton failed except in the vivid cases of Eric Thomas's Marcello and Lorraine Goodman's Musetta. Nothing has been as drastic and as life-enhancing as Larson's Rent. To go back from that to Puccini might seem like slumming.

© Village Voice