The rise of Rent
TEN YEARS AFTER the musical Rent took Broadway by storm with its poignant storyline about Aids, homelessness and drug abuse among a community of struggling artists, its themes of hope, love and 'making each moment count as if it was the last' remain as relevant as ever.
Which is just as well - a 10th anniversary world tour production comes to Hong Kong this month, fresh from its debut in Singapore.
The musical is based loosely on the French novel Les Scenes de la Vie de Boheme by Henri Murger, which inspired Puccini's La Boheme in 1896. Transposed from Bohemian 19th-century Paris to Manhattan's Lower East Side in the late 1980s, Rent deals with similar themes of poverty, artistic struggle and illness (the lead character Mimi, played by Hong Kong actress and singer Karen Mok Man-wai, no longer suffers from tuberculosis but from Aids).
Real-life tragedy hit the original show's opening. Rent creator and writer Jonathan Larson, who'd been working on the musical for seven years, died of an aortic aneurysm 10 days short of his 36th birthday on the morning of the final off-Broadway dress rehearsal. 'At the time he was writing it, he was a struggling artist, living in the village, so he had an understanding of what that meant,' says choreographer Marlie Yearby.
The bohemia of Rent came out of characters Larson knew and loved. The musical, which features rock, ballads, R&B and salsa, is the story of a group of friends attempting to protect a squatter camp and maintain residency in an East Side building. Musician Roger is just out of drug rehab and mourning his girlfriend's suicide, while his roommate Mark recently lost his performance artist girlfriend to another woman. Roger's new love interest Mimi is a dancer and junkie whose best friend, Angel, is an HIV-positive transvestite.
Associate director Evan Ensign, who has been involved in musical productions since 1997, says that, although the theme of Aids wasn't new in 1996, the show was groundbreaking in many ways. 'It was the first musical to deal with these issues in a very honest way,' Ensign says. 'The show also opened around the time of the musical spectacles of Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, with their giant sets.