musings by Charles Gilbert

Rent, the new musical which opened at the Nederlander Theater on April 29, 1996, is a show which has caused a kind of frenzy in the musical theater community. The press and the public have been captivated by the notion of composer and author Jonathan Larson as a talented new voice for a new generation whose sudden death has robbed lovers of the musical stage of decades of masterpieces. The Pulitzer, the Tonys, the record and picture deals, the staggering advance are all signs which invite us to conclude that theatrical lightning has struck.

But has it? It is daunting to try to undertake a balanced assesment of Rent in the face of its popularity juggernaut. I *want* to love it, for a variety of reasons: because I do believe Larson is an extremely talented writter, because I am heartened by the dramatic influx of new talent that is evident in evey aspect of Rent's success, and especially because Larson is writting the type of musical theater I dream of writing myself Ð works that use a contemporary musical and theatrical idiom to treat important themes and delineate provocative characters.

So let me raise a genuine cheer for Rent, and the accomplishments of the actors and instrumentalists who bring it to life. They give an passionate reading of Larson's expressive, energetic score, and the ovation that greets them at the end of the performance is well earned.

One of the most exciting things about Rent is the way in which it reinvents the language of passion for the musical stage. It draws boldly upon the instrumental timbres and vocal styles of rock music to express an intensity which is characteristic of the stadium rock show and the recording studio but not at all common in the musical theater.

In Rent, one can hear echoes of the great rock musicals that have preceded it, Superstar, Hair, Runaways, Chess, and Evita being the best known of the lot. Is this to say that Rent is derivative? Yes and no: all artists stand on the shoulders of those who have preceded them, and Rent certainly has its predecessors, works that Jonathan Larson knew and admired, and Rent can be better understood if one is familiar with its family tree.

Like the authors of the aforementioned works, Larson strove to bring the songwritting sensibility of his own era to a subject whose emotional style made it appropriate for the intensity of rock. He uses guitars, drums and synthisizers for his instrumental palette, and writes for singers (aided by the capable arraingments of Tim Weil) in a style rooted in rock's characteristic vocal excess: loud, high singing with ad lib embellishments. At its best, the blend is magical and the heart soars as the voices, and the volume, rise.

However, the rock musical itself is full of stylistic pitfalls, many of which have to do with the challenge of moving a story forward in between those pinnacles of passionate expression. Rent manages to stumble into many of these traps over the course of two and a half hours. In its conversational "recitative" passages, the rhythm of the music obscures or overwhelms the natural rhythms of the encounter. The rhymed dialogue walks a fine line between a poeticized vernacular and sing-song doggerel, often dependent on a trick rhyme or turn of phrase (which in the present production can be all but impossible to make out). Intelligibility is sometimes compromised by bad prosody or musical settings which try to cram too many words (and too much information) into a too-compact space.

The subject of intelligibility raises an interesting question: How much do we think we are entitled to understand (aurally) from a live performance in the theater? I'm no slouch at listening, and had even heard a few of the tunes before seeing the show, but I had a tough time making out many of the words. Nor was my experience unique: a neighbor in my row estimated her verbal comprehension at around seventy-five percent. A quarter of the time she couldn't make out the words, yet she, like the rest of the audience, seemed thrilled with what she heard. Perhaps this is a version of the opera house phenomenon, where music lovers whose keenest pleasures are aural enjoy the interplay between characters and emotions in a foreign tongue, despite an inability to understand. Or maybe the words just plain don't matter to many people; what do you think?

In the tumult surrounding the opening of Rent, I'm prompted to think of the parable of the emperor's new clothes. I'm not suggesting that the emperor is bare here, but it's hard not to conclude that he may have forgotten his underwear. The denizens of Rent's East Village setting would, no doubt, reply "Who cares?" but, alas, I do. The evolution of the musical is driven by an interplay of feeling and form, fire and finesse; Rent may feel like a quantum leap in a brand new direction, but it's more accurately seen as a swing of the pendulum, and its advances in music and performance style need to be matched by improvements in prosody, dramaturgy and production. The evolution of Rent to its present form indicates that Jonathan Larson was moving towards a more mature understanding of the writer's issues at stake. What a shame we'll never get to see the show he would have written after learning the lessons of Rent. Let's celebrate the achievement of Rent, but let's do so thoughtfully.

You can read more about the Rent phenomenon on the show's website, in Playbill Online, and in the archives of the theater coverage in @times on AOL. And if you're a young singing actor, you should be honing your rock chops. The sucess of Rent (like A Chorus Line and Les Miserables before it) will create a market for appropriately trained performers to appear in New York and on tour in Rent and in the imitations that will inevitably follow.

Readers who have made it this far may be interested in an exchange that took place between Eric Salzman and I on the C-OPERA (contemporary opera) mailing list. Eric knew Larson and his work and was familiar with Rent and its road to success. He is also the distinguished composer and author of a number of exciting music theater work which have been produced in the past 20 years; formerly the artistic director of the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, he now holds the same post at Music Theater New York, an organization he founded just over a year ago. Eric's posting on Rent and some responses follow:

Jonathan Larsen was a very gifted composer. We gave him one of the first Sondheim awards of the American Music Theater Festival. I used to go around saying that all of our Sondheim winners achieved some real measure of success except one you never heard of named Jonathan Larsen!

The truth is that "Rent" was (and is) a deeply flawed work. Jonathan carried it around with him in various versions and endless revisions for 7 years and had very little success with it until he dropped dead. Literally. Even the workshop production on E. 4th Street had very little going for it and it would no doubt have disappeared into the night like all the other dozens of such productions of worthy, unworthy and semi-worthy works that take place all the time. Only his sudden death changed all that, focused attention on the work and created the typically faddish rush that pushed the piece to where it is today.

What a price to pay for success!

I don't think this is one bit an exaggerated scenario and I think that "Rent" is, far from being an example of how original work can still find its way, it is actually a ghoulish example of the opposite: of the failure of the system to encourage or develop new talent and new ideas. I'm afraid the Larsen story is an object lesson in why we need to change our thinking about music theater and its relationship to the culture that produces it.

Unless you ask the right questions, you will never get any worthwhile answers. The issue of "selling out" is the wrong question. "Selling out" in musical theater terms is meaningless since there is nothing and nobody to sell out to. How to balance work for hire (what I presume is meant by "selling out"} with independent artistic work is an entirely different question and one that has no generalized, useful answer; some can manage it and others cannot.

The question of whether there is such a thing as commercial music theater -- whether this is a 'field' that one can opt to work in -- is an entirely different matter. It could be argued that there is no longer such a field, at least in the sense that it existed in the past. Therefore, musical theater is a field in which you cannot sell out because there is nobody and nothing to sell out to. The best you can do is write imitations of existing "hits" or stage a desperate last minute PR coup like dropping dead before opening night.

We will now see, of course, dozens of imitation "Rents" just as we had dozens of imitation "Hairs", imitation "Les Mizes" etc. This is not "selling out," just bad me-tooism. The most successful musical of all time, "Chorus Line" was not even really a musical in origin but came out of an experimental workshop in which dancers talked about themselves and their careers; it was developed in a non-profit theater by a visionary producer who had nothing in common with most producers and without any idea that it would be a "hit." Afterwards, said producer, Joe Papp tried for years to create consciously (and a bit cynically) another "Chorus Line," this time in the hope of producing another "hit". Of course, he failed completely.

It could also be argued, by the way, that there is no such thing as modern opera either, only baroque and romantic opera, complex social and artistic structures into which modern ideas are sometimes wedged with great difficulty and rarely with any kind of success. Opera houses and opera audiences (in this country at least) are uninterested in new work and, when new work does get produced, it is invariably for the wrong reasons. To me, that can be as much a form of "selling out" than anything that happens in the commercial theater today.

Eric Salzman

Eric's comments on "Rent" and selling out are characteristically trenchant. I agree with his assessment of "Rent" as a flawed piece, and I'd like to react with a couple of thoughts of my own:

1. I suppose it's obvious that there's little correlation between a work's absence of "flaws" and its success. Stop a minute and think of the number of flawed works which are successful - an admittedly slippery term which I use, I suppose, to describe works that are reasonably well-known and well-liked by a reasonably broad cross-section of reasonably sophisticated theatergoers. Your list, if you think about it, will probably include plenty of operas and musicals that are 50+ years old, since as tastes in theatregoing, storytelling and dramaturgy have evolved over the centuries, we probably perceive old works as "flawed" simply because they don't conform to our modern notion of how an opera/musical should be constructed.

2. What seems to keep musical theater works (flaws and all) in the "canon," if you will, is the excellence of their music rather than their viability as dramatic storytelling. Truth to tell, "Rent" has a lot of vibrant, exciting music in it, and will no doubt make a terrific CD. Jonathan Larson'sgreatest gifts were as a songwriter, not a storyteller; many critics of "Rent" have noticed its muddled dramaturgy, but audiences are swept away by the songs, many of which (to my ear anyway, though maybe not to Eric's) are pretty compelling. I daresay, though, that the works of Mozart, Puccini, George Gershwin and plenty of others live on because of their music (which can be recorded and mass-distributed on disk) and because of a reputation that was established long ago and not because of the ongoing viability of their creations as musical theater.

3. Eric's post makes a case for "why we need to change our thinking about music theater and its relationship to the culture that produces it." If by this he means getting past the notion that music theater (and, indeed, any art form in either the performing or visual arts) is a product which can bedistributed and sold for the benefit of the creator(s) and producer(s), I think this is a pretty unrealistic expectation. Certainly I would be the last to deny that the forces of the marketplace make it tough to get new work produced even once, let alone see it widely distributed. And I see how the mega-hit mentality of Broadway (soon to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney) and the process used by major opera houses in commissioning and producing new work virtually ensures that any new works appearing in those venues will be imitations of works which have appeared successfully in other venues. It seems to be that our greatest hope is the network of smaller companies with local constituencies which can commission and/or produce workfor local audiences without regard for (inter)national mega-success - one which I know has grown considerably through the last two decades, though I sense it growing fragile as funding sources disappear.

4. My view of the commercial musical theater is not quite as bleak as Eric's, though I absolutely agree with his judgment that the field no longer exists as it did in the past. This is a tough truth to understand because so many of the vibrant works in the repertoire from the past 50 years possess an intensity that makes them seem absolutely contemporary, as if they were created yesterday. The commercial musical theater was hospitable to experimentation in the 40's when Weill, Rodgers and Hammerstein et al were blowing the field wide open; it was in the 50's for Bernstein, in the 60'sand 70's for Prince and Sondheim and Michael Bennett; and I think the momentum of that era carried a few lucky souls (Maury Yeston, William Finn) through the 80's and into the early 90's.

Perhaps its wishful thinking on everyone's part, but I'm noticing a lot of commentators who see the "Rent/Noise-Funk" phenomenon as a sign that young audiences are eager to see music theater works which combine spectacle, accessible exciting music and theatrical storytelling. I don't think works of this type are created by writing "imitations of existing hits," though all of us as artists do stand on the shoulders of those who have preceded us and steal/borrow/recycle/quote (translation: "imitate") the past to varying degrees. I do think it's a damn hard thing to do, and even harder not to lose track of your own voice and your own identity in the process. My guess, though, is there are a lot of people out there like me who are ambitious (or stupid) enough to try to do it. All I can do is write in the hope that someone else is interested in the same things I am - and that I don't have to drop dead to get their attention.

Charles Gilbert/The University of the Arts

Thanks very much for your informed insights into Larsen's work and the hype accompanying this production. However,

"The best you can do is write imitations of existing "hits" or stage a desperate last minute PR coup like dropping dead before opening night." ?

I don't think I've seen a more cynical statement flash up on a CRT screen. I'm not criticizing it mind you, but is this where la vie boheme has led you?

Xavier Leonard

San Diego

I guess it is cynical but, unfortunately, it is also real.

I wasn't a close friend of Jonathan Larsen but I had a chance to admire his talent and help him along a bit. If there were a real means to nurture and get a hearing for new talent, Jonathan's life and work would have developed quite differently; he would have produced a body of work and had a chance to grow artistically. And maybe he'd even be alive today.

While he was alive, the people who now praise him and invest in his work, paid no attention to him whatever; it was only his shocking death that created the sudden burst of interest in what was essentially a dinky little downtown workshop that had previously attracted little attention. Am I cynical? No, I'm just hopping mad about this useless death and lost talent and about people that rave about Jonathan Larsen and his work but did nothing for him or his work while he was alive. To me, that's where the cynicism is really to be found.

And I'm also hopping mad about a system that doen't work any more. The whole thing is a morality play and we need to understand the moral of the story. That's the real plot of "Rent" and not just the starry-eyed, up-dated and highly rewritten version of "Hair" + "La Boheme" that the director and producers have imposed on the piece in order to turn it into a Broadway-friendly piece.

If that's cynicism, make the most of it!

Eric Salzman