The Ledge - Rent

Quote:

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I thought the music sounded contrived and the vocals forced. But, to each their own as many love it.

Have you read the Boston Herald review? It's brutal and utterly divine.

Deadbeats on parade: Too-old cast, inept lyrics drive down ‘Rent’
http://theedge.bostonherald.com/movi...ticleid=113491

Finally, a musical for the tone-deaf. For lovers of great American movie musicals, “Rent,” an adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer and Tony award-winning 1996 play, is an ordeal. The 525,600 minutes referred to in the “Chorus Line”-style opening number should serve as a warning to everyone in the audience that this is yet another overrated Broadway show arriving on the screen embalmed and ready for interment.

In the roles many originated onstage, the cast is now too old to pass as the story’s 20-somethings. As the fans of the stage show know, these characters are a cross-section of young downtown New Yorkers, many HIV-infected, circa 1989. These are young artists and bohos who refuse to pay rent for the living spaces they inhabit in the East Village section known as Alphabet City. That’s right, this is a musical about deadbeats. Presumably, these young people believe they are just too plain fabulous and brilliant to pay rent.

Loosely based on “La Boheme,” “Rent” became a “Hair” for the Gen-X Generation. It even has a character named Mimi (newly cast Rosario Dawson, who really can shake that thing). But instead of Puccini’s consumptive flower girl, Dawson’s Mimi is a stripper and intravenous drug user. This film’s variation of the poet Rodolfo is rock guitarist Roger (Adam Pascal), who is so bland he makes Jon Bon Jovi look like Joe Cocker.

Rounding out this bohemian variation on a theme of “Friends” are the straight filmmaker-schlub Mark (Anthony Rapp), the former boyfriend of newly gay performance artist Maureen (Idina Menzel), drag queen Angel (the talented Wilson Jermaine Heredia) and former MIT whiz Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin, whose “Law & Order” fans are in for a shock when they hear him sing). Angel bangs on plastic buckets in the street for spare change, while Tom has a gig teaching at NYU and sings such lines as, “Well, I’m thwarted by a metaphysic puzzle.” Me, too, and I’d love to be an Oscar Mayer weiner.

In the thankless role of Benjamin “Benny” Coffin III, the “sellout” who has married a rich girl and is now his former friends’ landlord and would-be rent enforcer, the usually appealing Taye Diggs is rendered bizarrely inconsequential.

Set in the bad old days of aggressive “squeegee” men, legions of homeless, piles of uncollected trash and an AIDS epidemic among young gay men and drug users, “Rent” looks as if it was shot on a generic backlot New York City set and often seems like the Queer Nation version of “Fame.”

That’s fine, but when I hear such grotesquely unimaginative lyrics as, “You be my queen, and I’ll be your moat,” I imagine Cole Porter and Irving Berlin having a seizure.

The nicely staged showstopping number “La Vie Boheme” comes too late to revive the movie and begs the question: What rhymes with “Boheme”? (Answer: “S & M.”) As Maureen’s lawyer and lesbian lover, newcomer Tracie Thoms sings and dances up a storm, and director Chris Columbus’ obsession with Menzel’s butt is endearing, although it might also be his way of declaring hetero status.

“Rent” the play has already been hilariously skewered by Matt Stone and Trey Parker in “Team America.” But it undoubtedly filled a need to express the grief, anger and sense of injustice that accompanied the AIDS tragedy, and the idea that Larson took a shot at fame and success and died before seeing his creation win the Tony is certainly edifying. The word “rent” connotes a sense all life is ephemeral. But it’s also too ephemeral to waste watching this.