Theater

Lite and Dark

As the AIDS epidemic's early years recede, Rent's pop evocation of them becomes more powerful

Rent Through 2/17: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph, 312-902-1400, $22.50-$70.

By Tony Adler

February 14, 2008

Puccini's La Boheme premiered in February 1896; Jonathan Larsen's La Boheme-inspired Rent in February 1996. Both are among the biggest of big musical hits, suggesting that while tales of love and death and poor young urban artists may or may not be timeless, they've definitely got legs.

This touring version of Rent, at the Cadillac Palace Theatre through February 17, seems calculated to stretch those legs into the third millenium. Two of the many leads are veterans of TV's very 21st century Idol craze: Heinz Winckler won the 2002 South African Idol competition and Anwar F. Robinson placed seventh in American Idol's top ten for 2005. And though the look of the production doesn't scream 2008, it doesn't try to hard to recreate the 80s time frame of the original either. The graffiti on the set's back wall looks more Banksy than Keith Haring.

But update it how they will, Rent's production team can never cut it loose from one defining phenomenon of the 80s: the advent of the AIDS epidemic, and the show remains a document of the devastation wrought by the disease, in this case on a bunch of sybaritic kids trying to live a Reagan era version of la vie boheme in New York's East Village. Not that I think anybody actually wants to distance the show from that plague. Rent is a bouncy, occasionally raunchy pop entertainment with a look-out-world appeal not all that different from American Idol itself. But it also manages to accrue a near-tragic power as it dances along. And that power comes from our awareness of the great darkness that was HIV/AIDS in the years before people were able to start talking about living with it. More than the simple sadness of knowing that a lovely 19-year-old is going to die in act two, this is a recognition of an all-but-unacknowledged holocaust. Look out world, indeed. AIDS may give people Kaposi's sarcoma but it confers elegiac grandeur on Rent even in a touring production. Larsen's contribution was a sweet, smart score and a book full of engaging postadolescents suffering age- as well as epoch-appropriate traumas. Winckler manages somehow to be both brash and angsty—if a little too healthy-looking--as Roger, the would-be rock star who begins a bitter quest to write "one great song" when he tests HIV-positive. Robinson is game as Collins, a streetwise "computer-age philosopher," but hasn't the stage presence to compete with his more polished castmates. He's left in the dust, for instance, by Jennifer Colby Talton as Mimi, a junkie with pole-dancing moves, and Jed Resnick as nebbishy-cool Mark, the Scarsdale refugee filmmaker whose best plans for poverty are always getting thwarted.

And then there's Kristen-Alexzander Griffith's Angel. Very tall with a long time-release capsule of a face that terminates in a big chin, Griffith is an unlikely choice to play the transvestite waif whose Camille-like death forms a throughline of the show. Even all dragged up, this Angel looks like a guy in a wig and heavy pancake. And yet she's magnetic—a tribute not only to Griffith's seductive way with a booty but Larsen's with character and story structure. Impish, knowing, simultaneously lost and found, Angel is great melodrama and more: an avatar of the reckless beauty that went missing when AIDS entered our world.

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