Rent - The Musical

Rent - The Musical Hong Kong Youth Arts Foundation Shouson Theatre Reviewed: Nov 26

Written by American composer Jonathan Larson in the early 1990s, Rent follows the bohemian lives of a group of struggling young artists living in New York's East Village for a year. A number of its characters have contracted HIV through either sex or drug addiction, although under the direction of Hong Kong Youth Arts Foundation's Lindsey McAlister, this musical is less a social history of the disease and more to do with friendship, loyalty and love.

The story revolves around aspiring filmmaker Mark (Eric Krueger), whose tight-knit circle of friends - Roger (Cain McInerney), Tom (David Da Costa), Angel (Cletus Chan) and Maureen (Jessica De Borja) - all have their own emotional issues to resolve.

McAlister opted for a bilingual script to make the show accessible to non-English speakers, with most of the English dialogue repeated in Cantonese. It is a commendable decision, though it meant quite a bit of text and character development was cut out to keep the show tight and under three hours.

In act one, for instance, the cast sang four to five numbers back to back without any dialogue in between, making the story hard to follow. But the awesome and top-notch singing and dancing more than made up for that.

Jaws dropped when Allira Wilson, who played exotic dancer Mimi, crooned playfully and lyrically through her duet with McInerney in Light My Candle, while Jessica Peralta, another strong singer who played Maureen's new love interest Joanne, shone through all her numbers. McInerney also showed he could hit his notes and hold them long.