Sunday, October 18, 2009

Can't Wait To See This

Playing Rent
Mary Martin Niepold
SPECIAL TO THE JOURNAL
Putting one of America's most beloved musicals on stage is a good call for Theatre Alliance. The company that is known for edgy fare expands its horizons and lures MTV and Facebook generations to witness how a musical can speak to them and render stagecraft as relevant as tweeter blogs. Rent opens Friday night.

Rent has been impressively popular since its workshop production in 1994 and its Broadway debut in 1996. Winner of Tony, Drama Desk and Pulitzer prizes, Rent was unstoppable during its 12-year Broadway run, which was followed by a motion picture and tours in the U.S. and abroad.

The story is simple enough: A group of young people living in New York's East Village struggle to keep their art alive while battling menial jobs, crisscrossed romances, the devastation of AIDS and just about every bias that can exist. They used to live together in a loft in the East Village, and their lives have taken various turns. What has remained true for all of them is the idea that we only have today, make the most of it, and love is love, however it looks.

To underscore this message, playwright Jonathan Larson mixes a wide assortment of cultures, socio-economic classes, genders, sexual preferences and ethnic backgrounds in his rock opera. Among the group of friends are an exotic dancer, musician and bisexual performance artist who have HIV, and a drag queen percussionist and philosophy professor who have AIDS.

Some of the songs have graphic lyrics, but there is no frontal nudity in the show, which is recommended for audiences 16 and up.

Larson wrote some 40 songs in his work, which is based on Giacomo Puccini's opera, La Boheme. He spent seven years writing and refining Rent and died unexpectedly from a rare disease shortly before the play debuted on Broadway.

Like his characters, he was an artist determined to make a mark and not sell out, and he waited tables in a New York diner to support himself.

"It's a rock opera, not a rock musical," said Christy Johnson. Johnson, who lives in Greensboro, has a master's degree in Liberal Studies with a concentration in acting from UNC Greensboro. She plays Maureen, a character very similar to herself.

Johnson says she has always wanted to act. Her start was in the sixth grade when she earned the title role in Heidi for the Livestock Musical Theatre Company in Greensboro.

It's been nonstop stage time for her ever since -- and, yes, if she could, she says she would love to live in New York and be an actor there. Just like her character, Maureen.

Maureen is a Southern woman who has left a boyfriend for a relationship with another woman. The man she leaves, Mark, is played by Michael Hoch, a chemical engineer from Clemmons, who loves to act and has been listening to Rent ever since he found a bootleg version of it when he was a high-school kid in Detroit.

"The main theme is there is no day but today," Hoch said. "Live for today. Love for today, because we're not guaranteed tomorrow. Another major theme is that love is not bound by race, or gender or social status. Love is love."

Jamie Lawson, the director and artistic director of Theatre Alliance, appreciates the fine crafting of the play. "I was taught in theater and English writing classes, if it's extraneous, cut it. Rent is a well-oiled machine. It just grinds it out, and a lot of the songs are hummable."

Six live musicians will play from somewhere on the set that is ingeniously arranged on multiple levels to resemble the brick interiors of industrial buildings in New York's lower East side.

And through it all, Rent shows us that friends are also family. They love one another, pure and simple, and sing their hearts out along the way.
Theatre Alliance presents Rent at 8 p.m. Friday and Oct. 26, 28, 29 and 30; at 4 and 8 p.m. on Saturday and Oct. 31; and at 2 p.m. next Sunday and Nov. 1 at 1047 Northwest Blvd. Tickets are $16, $14 for students and seniors. Call 723-7777.

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