Idina Menzel as Maureen Photo by Michael Hull Photography
I had a dream last night about Anthony Rapp. I was at my alma mater and sometimes workplace Dalhousie University trying to negotiate parking and meeting up with my cousin, Amy, and my friend Melissa, who I’ve known since we were six. Melissa and I went to Dal together. Somewhere out of this context came Anthony, and its telling how nonchalant I was to see him. Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal were supposed to come to the Bella Rose Arts Centre here, after all, back in June. In a way that was absolutely absurd- why would Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal ever come to Halifax, Nova Scotia? But there was this tiny voice in my head when it was announced that whispered that I had spent nearly thirty years manifesting this- so why should I be surprised?
The stories of the Rentheads who lived in New York City, and other places where the various touring companies came through, or, like Toronto, that had their own sit down runs of the show, have been told quite a bit over the past thirty years. These were stories of teenagers who went to HMV or whatever equivalent record store, bought the cast album, and camped out all night in front of the theatre hoping to score cheap tickets- teenagers who wore Rent merch and got their playbills signed by the cast, and who posted tiny grainy photos of themselves at the stage door on the bourgeoning Internet.
But what about the Rentheads who lived in places like Halifax, Nova Scotia- whose mom had to order the cast album into the record store? Before I got the Rent bible (where my mother ordered this from, I have no idea), or the cast album, I tried to download the libretto from a 1997 website to at least read it, which then opened on my computer in Notepad, and the file corrupted. Offline, I had to manually delete all the code out from in between the lyrics to the songs on what was initially an over 500 page illegible Notepad document. It took hours. I was twelve.
Beyond making my Daphne Rubin-Vega GeoCities site (one of the Internet’s first fan pages dedicated to her), I knew that I would be lucky to be able to go to New York City someday to see Rent on Broadway once in my life (that was in 2004), so in the meantime throughout my teenage years I started to write stories about what adventures my best friend and I might get up to if we could go to New York and not just meet the Original Broadway Cast of Rent, but actually become friends with them. I had never heard the word “fan fiction” before, but that’s exactly what I was writing- dozens and dozens of both handwritten and typed and printed OBC Rent fan fiction in a Broadway world imagined by someone who had only the most tangental and whimsical idea of what New York City might be like. In my stories Anthony and Adam showing up in Halifax was absolutely plausible.
On October 26th, Anthony Rapp’s birthday, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS streamed a sold out Rent: 30th Anniversary Staged Concert live from the Richard Rogers Theatre in New York, which featured a wide array of alumni cast members, including many from that Original Broadway Cast that I loved so much as a teenager. The event raised $4,571,464 (USD) to give supports to those living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. I was able to tune in and watch from Halifax. While many of the OBC cast members reprised their roles in the 2005 Rent film directed by Chris Columbus, this concert was the first time I’d gotten to see Daphne Rubin-Vega play Mimi Marquez and Fredi Walker-Browne play Joanne Jefferson- as well as most of the original ensemble members whose voices were so vivid and familiar to me after decades’ worth of listening to the cast album.
The focus of the concert was, of course, less on the Original Broadway cast members, and more on the show’s creator, Jonathan Larson, and the show itself. Part of what has made the musical so enduring is that after the original cast members left hundreds and hundreds of other actors, all over the world, including here in Halifax, have stepped in to don Mark’s scarf, Maureen’s leather catsuit, and Roger’s plaid pants to bring the story to a new audience, and over time, a new generation (or two). With only 8 hours of rehearsal the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS team assembled a cast of over 60 people to bring the story to life directed by Michael Greif with musical supervision by Tim Weil, and original Rent band members Kenny Brescia, Jeff Potter, Daniel A. Weiss, and Steve Gelfand. The question was: how do you showcase such a massive cast of players in a musical that only has eight principle characters?
The internet has dubbed the concert’s concept the Rent multiverses. The musical was divided in sections of scenes where sometimes there would be one actor playing each of the characters, and then in the next scene it would be a different group of actors taking over the roles- but in certain musical numbers there were as many as six different actors playing the same character each taking a different verse of the song. The most unique and beautifully evocative multiverse moment was in Mark’s song “Halloween,” where Anthony Rapp and five other Marks, all in variations on the same scarf, sang the song in beautiful harmony overlapping with one another to create something brand new. This was the only song that was given a purposeful new arrangement, and I found that really interesting. Part of me wished that the cast and creative team had had more time together because I think the multiverse idea could have really been elevated if more of the songs had gotten this “Halloween” treatment.
“Halloween” is Mark’s one solo song where he stops trying to manage everyone else’s emotions and lives, and begins to reflect on how Roger, Collins, Angel, and Mimi’s incurable diagnoses, and their lives together in peril, poverty and isolation are also impacting him. It is a song that often gets overshadowed by the more flashy and belty “Out Tonight” and “Take Me Or Leave Me,” emotional “I’ll Cover You (Reprise), or group songs like “Seasons of Love” or “La Vie Boheme,” which Mark also takes the lead on. It’s interesting though that for this concert it is “Halloween” that has this moment to shine and to set it apart, and I couldn’t help but see this in the context of Anthony Rapp. It was Rapp who stood on stage on Opening Night of Rent in 1996 and said, “We dedicate this opening night and every performance to our friend Jonathan Larson,” a line that he has continued to repeat throughout his trajectory with the musical, including again at the beginning of the concert on Monday night. None of the OBC were involved in the workshop reading of the musical in 1993, but Rapp and Daphne Rubin-Vega were involved in the Off-Broadway workshop of the show in 1994, so their relationship with Larson dated back the furthest. Rapp, along with Adam Pascal and Gwen Stewart, reprised their roles in a National Tour in 2009-10, which I was lucky enough to see in Toronto, and Rapp wrote a beautiful book Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (2006), in which he chronicles the death of his mother alongside the death of Jonathan Larson just as his Broadway career was taking off. The book was then adapted into a stage play that Rapp has performed as a solo show in cities across the United States, in Toronto, Edinburgh, and London. Rent was a defining experience, I think, for all the Original Cast members, but it and Jonathan seem to live and reverberate in Rapp in an even more visceral way. In this way it was apt to see “Halloween” set apart in the concert to give Rapp this moment to lead all the other Marks, the observers, the witnesses, the survivors, in this lonesome contemplation on memory and creativity.
I found the way that the actors were paired up to be really interesting as well. For the most part the pairings seemed more nostalgic than anything, of course, with Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp starting off the show together, Pascal with Daphne Rubin-Vega in “Light My Candle” and “Another Day”, and Fredi Walker-Browne and Idina Menzel performing “Take Me Or Leave Me” together. I felt bad that Wilson Jermaine Heredia, as Angel, had so little stage time with his fellow original cast members, but Jesse L. Martin wasn’t there, but Heredia was performing with a mixture of extremely capable musical theatre performers as Collins. My favourite of the casting choices was having the young Jordan Fisher playing Mark with Natalie Venetia Belcon playing Joanne because I loved the idea of Maureen dating a man who reads as significantly younger than her and then dating an older woman, because that adds such an interesting complexity to “Tango: Maureen,” as well as them both being BIPOC and Maureen being white also may suggest that Maureen has a history of dating Black folks both in ways that are potentially anti-racist, but also possibly in ways that are problematic. Maureen is someone who has a heart for social justice, but who can also fall into traps of white saviourism, and who certainly has a history of centring herself in her work- as well intentioned as it may be. This casting adds an additional depth to all three of these characters and their relationships that I would love to see realized in a future full production.
The choice to have Neil Patrick Harris and Aaron Tveit play Mark and Roger respectively for “What You Own” was significant because Tveit played Roger in a Hollywood Bowl production of the show that Harris directed back in 2010. Harris played Mark in the touring company back in 1997. Their paring seems more to do with the combined strength and compatibility of their voices. They brought a similar energy and equal command of the song as Rapp and Pascal, really doing it justice. Adam Pascal sang “One Song Glory” as if no time had passed, and Norbert Leo Butz gave us a very emotional “Your Eyes” at the end of the show.
Rent is set very specifically in the 1990s with the characters calling each other from pay phones to landlines with answering machines at a time when the longterm prognoses for new experimental HIV drugs like AZT were unknown, and contracting the virus, especially when exacerbated by addiction and poverty, was still largely a death sentence. The depiction of New York City’s Alphabet City as on the cusp of gentrification pushing longtime residents into homelessness and out of their neighbourhood all together is both a snapshot of a particular time in New York history, while also being a familiar more recent experience in cities big and small, like Halifax. Over the last 30 years I feel like the conversations around Rent have oscillated between whether the musical has become a bit of a historic piece, or whether it remains as immediate and relevant as ever. Certainly, in this moment, unfortunately, I think Rent continues to speak to our own time- certainly about the downfalls of living in an American society without a social safety net- without universal healthcare, in a society that doesn’t value art or artists, and is actively screwing the young and the vulnerable. “What You Own” is one of the songs that I think still reflects America’s capitalistic nightmare with just as much ferocity as it did in 1996. “Just don’t let go or you may drown.”
Rent was adapted by Larson from Puccini’s opera La Bohème (1896), and as such there are many moments in the musical that are very heightened, but one thing that I loved about the Original Cast members is that there are certain moments that are very grounded and conversational too. These beats are important because they establish these eight characters as being real people, despite the fact that they are often singing their emotions. Fredi Walker-Browne’s line in “We’re Okay,” “Did you cheat on Mark a lot, would you say?” sounded so much like just a genuine question- not necessarily an accusation- not a heightened meltdown- just as though the thought just occurred to her and she was curious how Maureen would respond. All of Walker-Browne’s transitions between the three different phone conversations that she’s having are grounded in realism. This gives Joanne power and status, but also makes a nice contrast to Maureen, who is always a little bit heightened and more combative. Here we see the crux of the issues in their relationship. The conversational flirting between Adam Pascal as Roger and Daphne Rubin-Vega as Mimi also roots them in the realism of a first encounter, despite the fact that they are also singing into each other’s faces over a candle. “They say that I have the best ass below 14th Street, is it true?” Mimi asks flirtatiously as she crawls around on the floor looking for the drugs that have fallen out from somewhere. She’s calling attention to the fact that Roger is looking at her, lusting after her. “What?” Roger says, stunned by her frankness. “You’re starin’ again,” she says, not letting him off the hook. “Oh no, I mean you do… have a nice-“ he starts bumbling, and then pivots, “I mean— you look familiar,” and, despite the fact that all of this is part of a song Pascal and Rubin-Vega choose when to speak, when to sing, when to take their time with the beats together to create the chemistry between Roger and Mimi that is sweet, awkward, lust at first sight, and also rooted in realism, because the audience has to believe that these two genuinely have the hots for each other from the jump or the entire plot falls apart.
Idina Menzel, of course, came out to thunderous and ongoing applause, as Maureen for “Over the Moon,” and it was glorious to hear her distinctive voice, every bit as powerful, gigantic, and gorgeous as ever, singing the songs that introduced us OG Rentheads to her so long ago. For me, Idina Menzel was the one OBC Rent cast member that I was able to kind of take with me after she left the cast in July of 1997. While I watched Jesse L. Martin and Taye Diggs play other characters in film and on television in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I had Idina Menzel’s very personal solo album Still I Can’t Be Still (1998), and a collection of bootlegged small concerts that she did- one at Joe’s Pub, one at Ars Nova, a couple from Provincetown, where she didn’t just sing songs, but she told stories about her life to the audience in between. Before Wicked, this made me feel like I had a tiny little sense of who Menzel was, beyond just my own imaginings and beyond her being Maureen Johnson. Now, having seen her do so much press for Wicked and the Frozen franchise it’s hard to see her in a concert like this live as solely immersed in her character, without also wanting to see Idina herself shining through. If you’ve heard anything about the Rent Concert you’ve probably heard that there were ample moments for almost all the OBC members to get to be meta-theatrically themselves, and the audience was losing their mind with joy over all of them. In “Over the Moon” especially though you really got to see Menzel at times tune out the chaos around her and not just become Maureen, but recreate so much in this performance art piece that is uniquely her own- and obviously perfectly tailored by Larson to her sensational voice.
In other moments is was infectious to see glimpses of how much fun the actors were having with one another in what must have been increasingly surreal scenarios. At one point in “Another Day” Adam Pascal looked like he was holding in giggles before Daphne Rubin-Vega leapt up against him, hauled him over her and kissed him in a moment that I’m sure sent fans screaming in delight. Similarly, Menzel seemed genuinely delighted to get to watch Fredi Walker-Browne perform her part of “Take Me Or Leave Me” where Joanne reminds Maureen that she has her own advantages and benefits in their relationship. Pascal gave everyone an unforgettable moment when he forgot to bring the matches with him for “Light My Candle,” forcing him and Rubin-Vega to have to improvise- reminding everyone in the theatre, and watching at home how magical, unpredictable, and alive the theatre is in a way that can never be replicated by a machine. “Someone bring me some matches.”
There were some technical glitches during the concert for sure, and some moments where it was more obvious that the show hadn’t had, by any stretch of the imagination, a long rehearsal process- although there were many more moments where the staging, even with that many people in the space playing the same scene as a myriad of other actors, was beautifully seamless. At the heart of it though, I feel moved to transition away from the 42 year old theatre critic that I am today and to view this experience through the eyes of the twelve year old Renthead that I used to be. When I was writing out the eight things that I knew about Daphne Rubin-Vega from an article that I happened to find in a July 96 edition of People Magazine for my GeoCities fan site I never thought that I would ever get the opportunity to see her play Mimi in any capacity. I never could have imagined that Rentheads like me would have the opportunity to experience a cast reunion of this magnitude, to feel like even on the East Coast of Canada, I was included.
It is amazing to think that a 35 year old man from New York interested in adapting a 1896 opera to take place in contemporary New York City to reflect the realities of living in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic would resonate so much with a twelve year old Canadian kid in grade eight at an all girls catholic school whose only tangible understanding of HIV was from an episode of Degrassi High (1989). And yet, I was filled with empathy for Roger and Mark, and Mimi and Collins and Angel who were struggling to make their own way in a world that was cold and dangerous and apathetic to them. The world that I saw around me back then was pretty antithetical to the world dramatized in Rent, but if anything that made me even more determined that better was possible for these characters, that people shouldn’t be defined by their past choices, and that human beings should never be discarded and pushed to the side to accommodate appreciating real estate and tech bro nonsense. These lessons have served me well as I have grown from an idealistic teenager into an adult, and as I have processed the world going to hell in a handbag around me.
Amid the current hellscape, where elder Millennials like me often long for the comparative simplicity of the mid and late 90s that Roger and Mark rail against in “What You Own” it is heartening to know that Jonathan Larson, his Pulitzer Prize winning opus, and the combined love and generosity of Rentheads everywhere have raised over 4.5 million dollars (USD) for people living with, living with HIV/AIDS.
“When you look out at the sea/ that’s where love will be/ that’s where you’ll find me.”- Jonathan Larson.
