Friday February 24, 2006 SGN.org |
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Volume 34 Issue 08 |
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Sunday, Mar 21, 2010
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The Real Spin |
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| Rent worth the rental for non-Rentheads | ||
| The public calls them Rentheads. You know who they are. They're the folks who were in line at the Paramount box office at 4:00 a.m. to pick up those day-of-show cheap tickets, back when Rent was on tour last year. The ones who know every nuance of every drumbeat; the ones who can sing along to the most obscure lyric; the ones who have practiced their own dance moves to "La Vie Boheme" on their dining room tables. They're freaks, paid-in-full members of the avant-garde militia; and they embrace their freak-ness with same passion they feel while putting on their zebra-striped tights, army surplus coat and combat boots every morning.
Cough. Because this is 2006, and you're no longer a starving bohemian, you can stop reading, Renthead. You've already seen the movie five times, paying the prime-time ticket prices. You can afford multiple pairs of zebra-striped tights, platform Doc Martens, a flat screen TV with surround sound and PSP, and you bought very own widescreen copy the millisecond Rent appeared on DVD at your neighborhood Suncoast. Sell out. Marc would tell you to give up your bougie job, dude. For the rest of us, who may have seen Rent once or twice, who enjoyed the energy of the cast, the innovation of the staging, and thought the songs were catchy, I'm glad to report that the movie version is just as touching as the play. It's nice to have scenes fleshed out, and it's refreshing to see an actual musical on film, instead of a drama with a bunch of song performances. Wait. You mean there are people who haven't seen the play at all? Really? In 2006? Wow. I must have taken a wrong turn. Well, even if you're not a Renthead, you probably know that Rent updates Puccini's opera La Boheme and places it in the 1990's. You also know that it's about a group of 20-something artists, friends and lovers, living a bohemian lifestyle in New York's Hell's Kitchen. Several characters are Gay, even more of them are HIV-positive, and all of them have serious relationship issues. Oh yeah, and hardly any of them can afford to pay their rent. Hence & uh, Rent. I've heard Rent described as a musical in search of its plot. That's almost fair. There are a lot of storylines and very little follow-through; the second act doesn't have the same momentum as the first, so it doesn't achieve everything it attempts as far as character development or catharsis. And I never liked that the "narrator" of the story, Marc (Anthony Rapp), doesn't really get that he's alone because he's always the detached person in charge of telling the story. Hrummph. If you're still reading this, Rentheads, I'm about to piss you off even more. The really bad news is that I hated the end of the play. Hated, hated, slit-my-throat hated it. Take a deep breath. Relax, back off. And put the knife down. Yes, I understand why it ends the way it ends. That doesn't mean I have to like it. And no, non-Rentheads, I won't give the ending away here. But here's a hint: if you know your opera, then you'll recognize that something that's supposed to happen doesn't. And even if you don't care that Rent takes a huge departure from La Boheme, it's still a pretty wonky ending. Okay, 'nuff said on that front. The good news is, I think the film version - which is mostly true to the play - makes this problematic ending more believable, and I wasn't left wanting to scream, "What the fuck?!" Instead I was left humming "Seasons of Love," "Tango Maureen" and "La Vie Boheme." And that's why you should rent Rent: The music is awesome. If you never had the opportunity to see the original Broadway cast, then this is your big chance. Forget that they're all at least ten years older than their characters, and that part of the charm was being blown away by these unknown entities. (Meanwhile, Jesse L. Martin has become a quasi-star on Law & Order, Taye Diggs had his own TV series on UPN, and Idina Menzel won a Tony for Wicked. Some of the bloom has left the rose.) Rapp - who is still, ashamedly, a relative unknown - has some wicked scenes, and his dancing is worth the rental price alone. The film version of Rent still crackles with energy despite the long-toothedness of the cast. Fair warning, non-Rentheads: this is a rock opera, which means that most of the dialogue is accomplished through song. Rentheads you should know: some of the singing has been changed to dialogue. The bonus features on disc 2 are substantial. In addition to the requisite deleted scenes (why is the "alternate ending" inevitably the ending that should have been used? Why?) there's a five-part feature length documentary about playwright/composer Jonathan Larson and how Rent made it to the big screen. You Rentheads might think you already know all there is to know about Larson's struggles to get his work produced and his untimely death from a heart attack the night before Rent was staged. I'll bet even you didn't know this much about Jonathan Larson: the documentary is almost two hours long, and worth every minute. If you don't cry once before the halfway point of the documentary, then you're cold. And probably don't have any musicals in your DVD library. |
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