If you know me personally, you know that I am a HUGE fan of musicals. I recently ran across an online quiz that prompted me to count the number of shows that I've seen in my 46+ years. The grand total is 69 musicals (which includes15 Broadway shows, 3 London West End productions, 9 Broadway tours, 4 regional professional productions, and 38 amateur shows).
A few nights ago, Fox continued its newly established annual production of a musical for live television with the cult favorite Rent by Jonathan Larson. Of all of the shows that have been done for live television, Rent seems like The One that would translate the best from the Broadway stage to television. The cast is small, there are not a lot of heavily choreographed numbers, the set is pretty minimal and easily adapted.
In case you've never heard of it, Rent was conceived by a young Jonathan Larson and had its beginnings as a workshop in the New York Theatre Workshop. It was loosely based on the story of the opera La Bohème by Puccini, a story of young bohemians living in Paris. Larson's version followed struggling young artists living in the lower Ease Village/Alphabet City part of Manhattan and the societal issues they faced as they reached adulthood. He based his version on his real life experience of living in lower Manhattan, sharing an apartment heated with an illegal wood-burning stove. Onstage, it realized/humanized sex (both hetero and homo), drugs, HIV/AIDS, addiction, homelessness, gentrification. It even touched on future things that definitely resonate today, like police brutality and the role of media in daily life. It didn't gloss over such things, they were given the spotlight with gritty rock opera style music and lyrics. It was fresh, it was painful, it was ugly, raw, and it was beautiful. This young creator was on the cusp of a revolution of the musical theater world. And then the night before his show was supposed to open to previews Off-Broadway, Larson died of an aortic dissection. He was 35 years old.
As always, the show went on. On opening night, the cast performed the show as a sort of solemn table read, singing the music while seated at the table on set. But by the time they reached the last number of Act I, La Vie Boheme, they couldn't contain themselves and jumped up to perform the show as rehearsed. At the end of the inspired performance, an member of the audience (which consisted of family and friends) shouted "Thank you, Jonathan Larson!" and a tradition was born, the revolution started. Rent sold out all of its off-Broadway performances and moved to Broadway. Finding a Broadway home for Rent was responsible for the restoration of the derelict Nederlander Theatre, and it pioneered what we now know as the ticket lottery. It became an anthem for Generation X and inspired a cult following of self-titled Rent-heads. Rent won 4 Tony awards, 6 Drama Desk awards and Larson was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The show ran on Broadway for 12 years, 5,123 performances.
I saw the original production of Rent on Broadway in August of 2001, I think. We got married in 1996 and had our first kid in 1997. Anchored down by the demands of parenthood, crushing school debt, and minimal income, we did not travel much early on in our marriage. But in spring of 2001, we got an opportunity go to visit New York City. A friend was getting married on Long Island, so we made a whole trip of it. I'm pretty sure on that trip we grabbed some cheap tickets from the Tkts booth and saw Phantom of the Opera. I had already seen it, and it was a good one for my husband's first Broadway show ever. However, it did make us realize that needed to go back to NYC. When we got home, we started planning for a return trip in August 2001. Part of that trip was advance purchase tickets to go see Rent and The Producers (starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick!). At this point I had only ever been exposed to classic musical theatre, so Rent was a real eye-opener for me.
So this blog post, which started out as as a review of Rent Live on Fox, has now turned into my love story for Rent on Broadway. I guess now I will briefly get into why I just did not connect with the Rent Live version. I am all for musicals. Musicals on Broadway, musicals on tour, movie musicals, musicals on television. As you can deduce from my listing of theater attendance way back in the first paragraph, I will go see a musical any time, any place. However it takes a team of insanely smart and creative people to find the insanely talented people who are triple threats (acting, singing, dancing) to put on such a show. When you cut corners, you lose something from the soul of the show.
I get it. Television producers are driven by viewership and ad space. But it is an extreme disregard for the value of talent when they assume they have to dumb down a production in order to appeal to the masses. Honestly, was Vanessa Hudgens as Mimi really going to bring in enough extra viewers (who might not have watched otherwise) to make a ratings difference? And have a real effect on the bottom line? I'm pretty sure, no. The High School Musical viewers were already going to watch the show anyway.
Stunt/star casting bugs me. It always has. Theater people are seriously talented, and I don't care that Taylor Swift has millions of fans who might pay to see her in the movie version of Cats. She will not be good in it, because they cannot autotune it enough to disguise her vocals for those of us who have music ears. I want to hear somebody who can seriously SANG (misspelling intentional). It takes away from the gravitas of the show to cast people who cannot handle all aspects of a role, as was the case with Rent Live. I admit, I didn't catch the first hour or so because there was a basketball game that I was required to watch. (Side note: I love Mississippi State Women's Basketball almost as much as I love theater.) When I was finally able to switch over to the show, the first thing I noticed was BVD (Brandon Victor Dixon) was the standout among the cast. He was followed by the kid who was playing Mark Cohen (who I think has a little Broadway under his belt). I also could NOT get over the fact that Mark was wearing some version of Red Wings shoes, which cost in the neighborhood of $300. Details, people. For a show that made an inside joke of Mark's (famous) ugly hand-me-down sweater, it's a shame they overlooked the fact that his shoes were ridiculous. I felt like I was watching a video game version of Rent, and it cheapened the overall message of it.
I read an article once that quoted a Broadway theater critic on stunt/star casting, and it perfectly summed up my feelings on the matter. "If anyone with a big Instagram and Twitter following can be thrown into the lead of a play, what's the point of real actors learning and honing their craft?"
Moo with me!
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