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Andrew Sun

Rent

Lyric Theatre,

Academy for Performing Arts

Ends Dec 25

When Rent opened on Broadway in 1996, it was a massive hit. Composer Jonathan Larson's tragic death on the final night

of previews ensured plenty of sympathy while the raw immediacy of Aids on New York's Lower East Side guaranteed full houses from the Upper West.

In the 10 years since, another kind of crisis has overtaken America's psyche, but Rent has survived in relevance. However, the local production featuring Karen Mok Man-wai nearly didn't, with WTO protests causing cancellations last Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.

Based on Puccini's La Boheme, Rent's modern bohemians are set in the midst of the Aids crisis in pre-Giuliani New York. What binds this group of struggling musicians, filmmakers, junkies and drag queens is their claustrophobic sense of social entrapment. The play does frustration well, disrupting scenes with ringing phones, broken melodies and abrupt vignettes. It also has an audience-appealing denouement filled with emotional transcendence. Rent takes the audience down a rock-opera road of despair, then lifts it up with a feel-good song like Season of Love.

For all its hype as a landmark rock musical, Rent fits in with a long line of musicals - whether it's the racial subtext of Showboat and South Pacific or the news headline topicality of Miss Saigon - that

use political and social issues to extend its gravitas. Yet, in the time since it first premiered, the plotting flaws  have become more evident, some of the music forgettable and the earnestness harder to accept.

Mok's game effort also comes up slightly short, although that has more to do with the  solid New York cast with their powerful vocals upstaging our local star. Frankly, her Mimi is neither desperate nor cynical enough to be a HIV-positive S&M dancer and junkie, but otherwise she offers a respectable performance.

A decade on, Rent  still manages to evoke power through its stories and drama.

$295-$695 HK Ticketing. Inquiries: www.siteforrent.com



Rent