RENT: Measuring Life in Love

In 1996 “Rent”, a musical inspired by Puccini’s classic opera “La Boheme” premiered on Broadway. Jonathan Larson, the creator of the piece tragically passed away of an aortic aneurysm the night before the play’s first preview at the New York Theatre Workshop. “Rent” went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, four Tony Awards and three Drama Desk Awards. The Original Broadway Cast Album entered the Billboard Pop charts at number 16 (unheard of since the 1960’s.) and a seminal piece of American Musical Theatre history was born.

Approaching its tenth year on Broadway and following myriad international and touring productions “Rent” is now a major motion picture from Sony/Revolution Studios. It is directed by Chris Columbus (Home Alone 1 & 2, Harry Potter 1 & 2) and stars 6 of the original cast members all the way back from that first preview including Taye Diggs (How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Chicago), and his wife Idina Menzel (Best Actress Tony Award winner for “Wicked”). Joining the original cast is Rosario Dawson (Kids, The 25th Hour) as Mimi, a heroin addicted exotic dancer and Tracie Thoms (CBS’s Cold Case) as Joanne, an Ivy-League lesbian lawyer.

“Rent” involves the story of a group of young bohemians in New York’s East Village scraping out an existence and struggling to express themselves artistically in the face of poverty, illness and drug addiction. “Rent” is what is known as a “through-sung” musical. The film extracts some lyrics from the musical and turns them into dialogue. Even still, it is not always particularly easy for an audience to follow what’s going on, so with that in mind, in the immortal lyrics of one of the show’s love duets, here goes:

Roger (Adam Pascal), a sullen and withdrawn musician with HIV, is dealing with coming back from heroin withdrawal and his girlfriend’s suicide. He lives in a loft with Mark (Anthony Rapp), an aspiring filmmaker who was recently ditched by his live-in girlfriend Maureen (Menzel). Maureen, a self-involved performance artist takes up with Joanne (Thoms), an attorney and activist born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Mark’s former roommate Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin) is an HIV positive philosophy professor on his way back from MIT to visit when he’s mugged out on the street. Angel (Tony Award winner Wilson Jermaine Heredia), a Good Samaritan drag queen drummer (who also has HIV) comes to his aid. Mimi (Dawson) lives downstairs from Roger and is interested in him. But she also has ‘dealings’ with Benny (Diggs), Mark and Roger’s former roommate who ended up marrying their landlord’s daughter and alientating his friends. Benny has reneged on his promise to his friends to provide a Rent-free artist space and this is the inciting incident to the story.

Chris Columbus has seen his films open during the lucrative Thanksgiving moviegoing weekend many times. As the writer and/or director of many family favorites (Mrs. Doubtfire, Stepmom) he wouldn’t seem the obvious choice to shepherd a movie musical replete with such serious themes as destitution, AIDS, addiction and the artist’s struggle. Columbus recognizes that it may not seem appaRent but he has a close affinity to the story of “Rent”. He says, “I lived in New York for 17 years in the 1980’s when “Rent” takes place. (The story has been moved to 1989 to enhance the idea and immediacy of AIDS as a death sentence.) I lived in a loft and had a lot of those experiences. We were dirt poor and we lived in a loft on 26th Street in Manhattan for 3 years. I could relate to exactly what Mark and Roger were going through. I knew those people. So for me, it was an opportunity to go back to a very important time in my life and to bring my own experiences to that part of it. I was concerned about someone else doing it who didn’t have that experience and hadn’t lived in that world.” And indeed, he was not the first choice. For a while Miramax (The Weinstein Years) planned to do this film with Spike Lee attached. During this time the names of Justin Timberlake, Usher and Christina Aguilera were bandied about as possible choices for the leads. Columbus, who saw the original cast perform the show numerous times when it first opened says, “I’ve been waiting 9 years to do this movie so I was obsessed and for various reasons I couldn’t do it. Other directors were attached to it so for me it was really important to do this film. I was like a racehorse at the starting gate when I was finally told I could get this movie done.” So how do you jump from Harry Potter to heroin and AIDS? “It’s all a part of the same, you know, it’s a big world out there. I’ve always done films that theoretically were about family. “Home Alone” deals with a kid who doesn’t have a family. Harry Potter is a kid who’s always in search of a family and this is about a diffeRent type of family. I’m always fascinated by this particular theme. And that may be an extreme connection in a sense, but I just feel that I was the right guy to do this movie.” And what about those pop stars in the roles? “I went so far as meeting with Justin. He’s a terrific guy. I don’t know if you’ve ever met him (no, not yet.) but he’s actually a really kind of sweet guy. But then I started to meet with the original cast and I realized that the thing I responded to was the connection they had partially because of Jonathan Larson’s death. There’s a chemistry there that as a director I had never seen before.”

The new girls on the block are Rosario Dawson and Tracie Thoms. In replacing Daphne Rubin-Vega and Fredi Walker respectively, they were both faced with the daunting task of joining the rest of the original cast – many of whom had their careers launched from the play – in recreating Larson’s vision. Dawson says “I was actually really nervous when I went into the audition. It’s one thing to go against some other actors for this part, but I was going against actors who originated these parts; people who have been nominated and gotten Tonys for it; people who know it inside and out and who knew Jonathan Larson as well and totally had the inside track. And I had never done it before, but I was really excited because I knew I could do it even if I was delusional.” Ms. Dawson also brings to the role a unique perspective as she actually lived as a squatter for a time. “I grew up in a spot in the Lower East Side and my mom is so much of what Mimi could have been or was. She was a young woman and she was struggling and she moved into a building with no heat or water or electricity and thought it was a better opportunity for her even though her family thought that was crazy. She was an idealist and it helped her to think that this is what she could do with her life, even if it was a struggle. She knew she could build it with her own hands.”

Thoms, an admitted Renthead and graduate of Julliard was never cast in the stage production, but finally got her wish to play Joanne in the film version. “Rent was a little bit of an obsession for me for a while. So to actually be apart of it now, for someone to say to me...'Okay you, the big fan of these actors…come be in the movie with them’ – it was great and really scary at the same time. But the whole cast completely embraced me and Rosario from the moment we arrived.”

Taye Diggs and Idina Menzel met during the original production of the play and are now married. They are both presently back on New York stages performing in a revival of “A Soldier’s Play” at Second Stage Theatre and in Michael John Lachiusa’s “See What I Wanna See” at the Public, respectively. They both have humorous yet singular ideas about the casting of the film and reuniting with the others to revisit these characters and this story. When asked how the casting may or may have not affected their relationship Diggs chuckles, “I didn’t want to sign on unless I knew that this piece was going to be in the right hands and Columbus gave me some indication by agreeing to use all of us. But then I read the script. I couldn’t imagine speaking some of the songs we had sung, so that freaked me out and for a while I didn’t know whether or not I was going to do it. But we had agreed that regardless it would be good for her career because I had done a few more films and she had not. We kind of made the agreement that it was something she should do whether I was in it or whether it was going to be good or not. Luckily, we both did it, we both stayed together.” Idina jokes, “When Christina Aguilera was rumored for Mimi, there was discussion that Maureen would be played by Brittany Murphy. I said to my manager, look, I know I’m over 30, but please just get me a meeting. It came as a surprise that they used so many of us.”

The immense undertaking of turning a stage musical into a film presented various challenges to the cast and artistic team. Asked to compare performing “Rent” live and on film Jesse L. Martin (Law & Order, Ally McBeal) says, “Well, obviously we didn’t have that incredible audience that we had every night, but the truth of the matter is we did have a little cheering section in the Larson family. We were able to turn to them. And we had our crew who I guess uncharacteristically were very, very into the story. It wasn’t harder to do without the audience -- we were so excited to be there. “ DiffeRent perhaps? “Yeah, sure. I would go to the set everyday and certainly not to work everyday, but I always wanted to see what was going on. When we were performing “Rent”, it was such a zeitgeist. We were so wrapped up in what the show had become. A lot of it was pressure-filled. People were expecting the show to literally blow the roof off the theatre every night. By the time we got to filming the movie, I relaxed a whole lot and that’s a great place to come from as an actor.” Adam Pascal (School of Rock) says, “It was all about the perfect alchemy. The chemistry of all of us together was, I felt, the same chemistry that I did off-Broadway between the cast, Michael Greif and Jonathan Larson. We had that same chemistry making this movie. Everybody was on the same page. Everybody had the same vision of this film and the same way that I put all my faith in Michael Greif when I was doing it on stage, I did the same with Chris Columbus and I was not let down. I ask Pascal what was it about the piece that keeps leading him to find that alchemy. He says, “It’s something about the stars lining up. Look, there have been casts all over the world and the chemistry isn’t always there. The show isn’t always so good, but I think the original Broadway cast, this original off-Broadway cast and this movie’s cast, it needed to be right and for whatever reason – Jonathan is watching us - it was right. If you believe in that kind of thing, he brought us all together because now this is on film, this is forever. The legacy could have been it was a Broadway show that’s still running, but the movie sucked. Phantom is still running and I loved it. But the movie sucked. We didn’t want to have that same issue. There was so much riding on it.”

Anthony Rapp (Adventures in Babysitting, School Ties) has become the de facto gatekeeper for “Rent”. He was with the production since at its earliest inception including the readings and workshops. He has also written a book on his “Rent” experiences called Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Musical “Rent”. He spoke eloquently about how this piece resonates. “ I just think that the themes are timeless and that any time when you’re dealing with the larger questions of what it means to be alive and what it means to be part of a community and what you do in the face of struggle and loss and love, I think those are questions that anyone can relate to. In today’s very divided political climate I think any piece that presents a real tapestry of human experience in the way that “Rent” does can only forward the conversation instead of splitting people apart.” Heredia adds, “ I think the show has such resonance because it’s about timeless universal themes encompassing real people. These people in the film were all Jonathan’s friends. He wrote about his life, he wrote about his friends – his environment. Some of these things happened. And I think people identify. If you don’t identify with the drag queen, you’ll identify with Collins, you’ll identify with Roger. If not Roger, Mimi. There’s something in this film for everyone.”