However, the rock opera left me unsatisfied. My three companions didn't share my reasons, so maybe it's just me. I suspect, however, that since individual experience strongly affects one's reaction to art, and I am just too old for RENT.
Based on the nineteenth-century opera LA BOHEME, RENT concerns a bunch of would-be artists living in the East Village. In LA BOHEME some of them were dying of consumption; in RENT, it's AIDS. There is an on-stage death scene which is moving, as one character loses his drag-queen lover. My problem was not with any of that, but with the underlying assumptions about the Bohemian life: it's much better than any stodgy bourgeois existence; it produces "real" artists because earning money corrupts people; the young artists are all superior to their frantic parents, who phone them from concern that the kids are all right; artists have the right to occupy their lofts without paying the landlords any rent because, well, they're artists.
None of this seems true to me. Worse, it seems affected, exploitative, and even pathetic. Many artists have produced wonderful work while living bourgeois lives. Some even went on producing after they'd made money. Landlords have taxes to pay on their buildings and children to feed. Not everyone who works in, or even is, a corporation is despicable. And parents deserve a break in their anxiety for their kids, in the form of a few phone calls now and then.
So I left the theater cranky. And definitely too old for this show. I wanted to say to everyone on stage: Just pay your damn rent!
5 comments:
I never saw the entire movie beginning to end, but saw bits of it and loved the music -- EXCEPT there is part of one song where they all laugh about throwing some lady's dog off the balcony, presumably because it barked too much. I can't go back and watch the whole thing because characters who think that's funny are completely unlikeable to me.
Your points seem very valid to me, in any case. I'm in my 40s -- guess I'm too old for it too!
This won't really affect your impression of them, but unless the movie changed something, this one character was paid to play her drums until this high strung dog jumped off the balcony. They didn't throw the dog off...it was more of a black comedy moment.
But none of the characters are supposed to be saints--far from it, they're all quite flawed. I mean, aside from Collins and maybe Mark (whose flaw, at least on Broadway, was weak as flaws go).
IMHO--I haven't seen the movie, so maybe they changed things a ton.
P.S. part of the wackiness of it--the dog turns out to be the dog of the wife of the quasi-antagonist of the first half.
i didn't see the movie. i saw the play, which may or may not be the same in details.
Whoops, sorry, my comments were really for Amy. I have the movie but saw the musical on Broadway (presumably similar to what you saw, Nancy)--I need to get around to watching to movie to see how it differs....
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