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    Can ’Candide,’ ‘Rent’ and ‘Spamalot’ Ever Be Truly Revived?

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    “Candide” in an opera house. “Spamalot” and “Rent” cheek by jowl with Shakespeare. But treating them as classics may not be doing them justice.There comes a moment in the afterlife of even the most successful musical when it threatens to become a museum piece. One day, it’s the hot new thing, perhaps even defining its era; next, it’s “The Merry Widow.”On a theater trip through New York State and Ontario last month, I saw three musical revivals in various stages of that transformation: one — “Candide” — fully evolved into an opera house staple that’s rarely performed anywhere else; the other two — “Rent” and “Spamalot” — on uncertain trajectories toward classic status or the dustbin.The “Candide,” at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., opened with what seemed to be an acknowledgment of the situation. From a stageful of shadows at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Glimmerglass’s home on sparkling Otsego Lake, dim forms awakened as if from a long slumber, emerging from tarps and storage trunks. Eventually a sort of ghostly maitre d’ cued the orchestra, which sprang to life with the undying joy of Leonard Bernstein’s overture.It was an indication that the somewhat zombified story of “Candide” would always need resuscitating by the music. Rejiggered every which way since it was first produced on Broadway in 1956, the book has so many problems and variations that the options for reviving it resemble a game of 3-D chess. And the list of musical numbers Bernstein wrote to accommodate the changes — then discarded, rewrote, re-discarded, recombined and otherwise cycled into and out of the score — comes to nearly 100 titles.Glimmerglass’s version, originally produced there in 2015, is itself a revival, no more dramaturgically coherent in Francesca Zambello’s staging than any other. Though adapted from a Voltaire novella generally considered a masterpiece, its story — an innocent boy’s education in optimism is undone by the ever more absurd horrors of the actual world — becomes a case of diminishing returns when staged. Nora Ephron, noting that you get tired of the characters’ misadventures long before they do, called it a musical that always seems to be great “on the night you’re not seeing it.”True, yet it is at the same time glorious. Young singers with clarion voices — and a 42-piece opera orchestra, conducted with incisive good humor by Joseph Colaneri — bear you swiftly through the longueurs. In the process, a flop that tried too hard to be au courant, satirizing America’s postwar euphoria, is transformed into a timeless piece that, having found its niche, lives on and on. When Candide and his lover, separated by various disasters, sing the lovely and witty “You Were Dead, You Know,” they might be singing about the show itself.Brian Vu, center, as the title character in “Candide,” whose optimism is unraveled over the course of the musical by the horrors of the real world.Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass FestivalThere’s a similar moment in “Spamalot,” the deliberately ludicrous musical by Eric Idle and the composer John Du Prez. If you’re familiar with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 1975 movie on which it’s closely based, you’ll probably be laughing even before a chorus of medieval plague victims, being carted off in tumbrels, sing pathetically that they’re “not dead yet.” One of them insists he’s in fact feeling much better.I don’t know whether “Spamalot,” playing this year at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, can expect a similar recovery. A Broadway hit in 2005, it offered silly distraction and precision direction (by no less than Mike Nichols) in the ongoing dark after the Sept. 11 attacks. Not that it was designed to speak to its time, let alone all time; it was content just to fill time. Its ambitions seemed limited to rhyming “Lancelot” with “dance a lot” and trotting out a Python dream team including the French taunter, the knights who say “Ni” and a chorus line of self-flagellating monks bonking themselves on the upbeat.Like the movie, it was a blast, even if its satire, coming from all directions, seemed to have no target. (Much of what it pokes fun at are the conventions of musicals themselves.) Seeing it at Stratford, as part of a 12-show repertory that includes four Shakespeare productions as well as new plays and modern classics, is a disorienting experience. As comedies go, it’s no “Much Ado About Nothing.” The festival’s dignity and its ethos of highbrow good work do something weird to material so deliberately lowbrow and anti-establishment.In 2018 at Stratford, “The Rocky Horror Show” suffered from a similar problem — but recent Stratford productions of “Chicago,” “The Music Man” and “Guys and Dolls” (all directed and choreographed by Donna Feore) did not. The festival does sincerity, even the gimlet-eyed kind, very well. But as directed by Lezlie Wade and choreographed by Jesse Robb, “Spamalot” feels hasty and mechanical, relying on the prefab jokes to do most of the work. They don’t.Yet it’s not clear to me that even a fresher and more idiomatic take would solve much. (We’ll have a chance to find out with the arrival of a completely different “Spamalot” revival on Broadway this fall.) For many of us, the punchlines are so ingrained that they have become golden oldies, suitable for a kind of karaoke pleasure but unlikely to produce helpless guffaws. Maybe comedy needs to skip a few generations until minds that know nothing of migratory coconuts can test its enduring worth.But what about tragedy? For the sake of argument, let’s call “Rent” a tragedy even though it does everything in its considerable power to turn the nightmare of AIDS in the late 1980s, recalling parallel plagues in its 19th-century sources, into musical theater uplift. And time has further distorted it. In the manner of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in their time, the show’s big anthem, “Seasons of Love,” has now delaminated from its story entirely. Instead of a plea to treasure brief lives, it has become an all-purpose good-times chorale; my sons (today in their late 20s) sang it at their elementary school graduations.Nestor Lozano Jr., center, as the drag queen Angel in the 2023 Stratford Festival production of “Rent.”David HouAn author should be so lucky as to have that problem, but it nevertheless is a problem. So is the meta-tragedy surrounding “Rent,” whose author, Jonathan Larson, died at 35 in the hours just before the show’s scheduled premiere. The work has essentially been frozen as he left it that day in 1996. Thom Allison, who directed Stratford’s production, told me that permission for even the tiniest change in the script, to correct an acknowledged inconsistency, was denied by the estate’s representatives.That leaves new generations little wiggle room in which to experiment with refreshing “Rent” and finessing its headaches. As always, it struck me in the Stratford production that the work of the downtown artists the show means to valorize is actually terrible; that the central male character is utterly passive; that its credibility as history is all but shattered by the last-minute resurrection of a character we’ve just watched succumb to AIDS. Having seen “Spamalot” the night before, I was surprised she didn’t sing “I’m Not Dead Yet” as she awoke.Yet Allison’s staging at Stratford’s flagship Festival Theater, also home this season to “Much Ado About Nothing” and “King Lear,” made a pretty good case that, in its scale at least, “Rent” can hold its own in such company. Certainly the story of the drag queen Angel and her lover Tom Collins (traced in the songs “Today 4 U,” “I’ll Cover You” and “Santa Fe”) has a full arc and tragic grandeur, enhanced here by frankness. The sight of Angel, beneath her drag, covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions from neck to ankle (thanks to a cleverly made body suit) sent me reeling back to 1989.The question is whether “Rent” can be meaningful even for those unable to be reeled back that way. The Stratford production makes the case that it can, but however much the appearance of a new section of the AIDS quilt during the finale moved me, I wondered how many people under 40 even knew what it was. Some shows are so of their moment that they cannot be wholly of ours.CandideThrough Aug. 20 at the Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown, N.Y.; glimmerglass.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.SpamalotThrough Oct. 28 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.RentThrough Oct. 28 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes. More

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      ‘Without You’ Review: Anthony Rapp’s Seasons of Love, and Loss

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      The actor, who starred in the original Broadway run of ‘Rent,’ reflects on the show’s early days and dealing with the grief of his mother’s death.Anthony Rapp’s show “Without You” is, in part, about the genesis of “Rent.” It is opening Off Broadway on a symbolic date: exactly 27 years after both that hit musical’s first public performance at New York Theater Workshop, and the death of its creator, Jonathan Larson. That’s 14,201,280 minutes gone by, 14 million moments so dear.As Rentheads will know, this number riffs on a famous lyric from “Seasons of Love,” the runaway anthem from “Rent” and now from “Without You.” That song pops up a few times over the course of the new show, and it still has the power to spur a Pavlovian lacrimal reaction, especially in the context in which Rapp (who originated the role of the aspiring filmmaker Mark) employs it here. Some of the moments he reminisces about are not so dear, because “Without You” is largely about death — brutally unexpected for Larson, and gruelingly protracted in the case of Rapp’s mother, Mary, who had cancer.For decades now, seeing “Rent” has been something of a coming-of-age rite, a gateway for young fans not just into the wondrous world of musical theater, but into adulthood — exposing them to gritty subject matter, helping them come to terms with who they are or might be. It played a similar role for Rapp, as he explained in “Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical ‘Rent,’ ” which came out in 2006. He turned the book into this play with music in 2008, performing it in other cities before finally making its way to New York, where it’s playing New World Stages, directed by Steven Maler.Before getting to the last two elements of the book’s subtitle, it’s worth noting that the theatrical version mostly skips the romantic side of the “love” part. The memoir did not offer much by way of introspection on the subject, but there were glimpses into a personality that appears more complicated, darker even, than the one we get onstage.It is clear that being cast in “Rent” was a turning point in Rapp’s career, even if he was not quite the bumbling beginner he suggests. Yes, he was a 22-year-old actor with a day job at Starbucks, but by the time the director Michael Greif cast him in the “Rent” workshop, he had already been in three Broadway shows and a few movies — one of the first things Larson told Rapp was that he’d liked him in “Dazed and Confused.”“Without You” opens Off Broadway exactly 27 years after the first public performance of “Rent” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Without You” is at its most engaging when delivering a quasi-documentary look at the musical’s early days. Rapp performs the song he did for his audition, R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” and we hear a snippet from the demo cassette Larson gave Rapp so he could learn a number for his callback. Hearing the late composer’s own voice is quite affecting, and there is a surreal quality to the scene.Backstage stories have a built-in entertainment factor, and Rapp’s reminiscences have an in-the-room immediacy and enthusiasm. Add the very real artistic and commercial impact of “Rent,” and it’s easy to forgive him for overstating how edgy the show was for its time. After quoting a lyric from “La Vie Bohème” that reclaims slurs for gay men and lesbians, for example, Rapp quips we wouldn’t hear it from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe not, but “Hair” was no slouch when it came to profanity, slurs, drugs and sexuality. And at least that show did not rhyme “curry vindaloo” with “Maya Angelou,” as Larson did.The composer’s abrupt death from an aortic aneurysm after the first dress rehearsal has entered musical-theater legend, and while Rapp was understandably devastated, “Without You” is, just as understandably, more poignant when he’s dealing with his mother’s yearslong decline. The actor recounts frequent trips to Joliet, Ill., where Mary lived, and re-enacts phone calls in which he plays both parts of the conversation (though in general he struggles to differentiate women’s voices, which all end up sounding the same). He also punctuates his mother’s side of the narrative with songs he co-wrote, mostly in an amiable indie-rock vein (the music director Daniel A. Weiss leads a punchy five-piece band from behind the keyboards). But it is hard to step away from the shadow “Rent” casts, then as now, on Rapp’s life: He circles back to that show with a rendition of the number “Without You” at his mother’s memorial. You would have to be made of stone to not be moved.Without YouThrough April 30 at New World Stages, Manhattan; withoutyoumusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      How Jonathan Larson Taught Me to Become a Better Critic

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      In the film version of “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” about a composer who dreams of Broadway, a “Rent” die-hard discovers more to love in musical theater.I watched “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Netflix’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical, four and a half times in the span of three weeks. I’ve listened to the soundtrack three times, with the exception of the opening song, “30/90.” That I’ve listened to at least a dozen times.When you replay a song that often, whole verses start to inscribe themselves into your memory. You begin to see beneath the surface, unearthing the bones of the music: a key change, a tempo shift, a bluesy bass line that sashays in and is gone in an instant.When I talk about Larson’s work, I get romantic. That’s been the case since I was 15, thanks to his Pulitzer Prize winning musical “Rent,” and now, thanks to “Tick, Tick … Boom!” But there’s a vital difference in the way I engaged with his work then versus now: Then, it was as a fan just beginning to discover an art form that would shape her personal and professional life; now, it’s as a critic who better understands the possibilities of musical theater.But I still have a ways to go — I’m continually learning how to be a better fan and critic of the theater, and 26 years after his death, Jonathan Larson is my unlikely mentor.Larson, left, with the director Michael Greif before the final dress rehearsal of Larson’s breakthrough show “Rent.”Sara Krulwich/TheNew York Times“Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Larson’s precursor to “Rent,” is a musical about the playwright’s attempts to get his dystopian rock musical, “Superbia,” produced. His ambitions and anxieties create tension with his girlfriend and his best friend, whom he pushes to the sidelines.Though Larson’s show stars a composer named Jon and is, in large parts, autobiographical, the film — written by Steven Levenson and directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda — bridges the gap between the writer and his work, making Larson himself the protagonist. We shift back and forth between his staged production of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and the correlating events in his life.The film casts an affectionate eye on Larson’s life and legacy. Larson (Andrew Garfield, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for the role) is an innocently aloof artist and yet also intimately present, transparent to the audience through his songs, which seem to erupt from the top of his head in an effervescent gust of rhythm.Garfield bounces across the screen with the energy of a child on a trampoline; his downright kinetic performance is a flutter and flush of gestures, limbs jerking and flailing in all directions. In some scenes, Larson stops to consider a thought or a phrase; his head cocks to the side and his jaw relaxes open, just slightly, as though to make room for new lyrics to fly out. It’s kooky. And endearing.As is the world Miranda builds: a bespoke version of 1990 New York City for theater nerds, where André De Shields strolls in as a haughty patron at the Moondance Diner, where Bernadette Peters is having her coffee and where three of the original “Rent” cast members (Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Wilson Jermaine Heredia) are bums singing on the street.That I even recognize so many of those faces is because of Larson.The original cast of “Rent,” which went on to a long Broadway run. Several of the performers show up in “Tick, Tick … Boom!”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already written about my love for “Rent,” a love I share with my mother — how it provided a Bohemian fantasy that could be the repository of my teenage insecurities, anxieties, rages and woes. I also discovered the musical around the time I was taking baby steps toward becoming a critic, writing arts pieces for my high school newspaper.Larson taught me that the constellation of notes in a score has space enough to hold immense grief and irrepressible delights. That a musical doesn’t have to be breezy and carefree, nor campy and dated. It could be bold and contemporary — even tragic. Or as strange and subversive — “Rent” is full of sex and drugs, bonkers performance art and mentions of B.D.S.M. — as any form of art.The musical, I came to appreciate, has a nested structure: The book is the spine, and each song in the score contains its own micro-narrative, its own voice, conveyed through music.I still love “Rent” like I did when I was 15, but as my affections for it have aged, they’ve taken on the sepia tone of nostalgia.I’m not the same person I was a teenager — thankfully. I’ll raise a glass to la vie boheme but won’t stay out with the eclectic crowd at the Life Cafe for quite as long.Watching the “Tick, Tick … Boom!” movie for the first time, I immediately fell hard for “30/90,” which felt adapted from my own experience. Long before I became a critic, I was an artist, and I’ve always worked under a self-imposed sense of urgency; when I was a kid, I expected to be a famous poet, journalist and novelist by the time I was 25.When I turned 30, in the middle of our first pandemic summer, I had a monthlong existential crisis. Hitting that milestone age, as Larson sings in “30/90,” means “you’re no longer the ingénue.” I still fret needlessly about time and mortality, clinging to the same clichéd, self-important worries about one’s legacy that so many artists do, Larson included.Garfield, as Larson, struggles with anxiety about not fulfilling his creative dreams at an early enough age. Macall Polay/NetflixAt some point, as I rewatched the film after an anxious and depressed afternoon, I recalled how I used to do the same with “Rent.” Again Larson helps, not just in those joyless moments of mental panic but also in the moments of joy, when I sing along to the new film’s “Boho Days” while preparing dinner, shimmying over the kitchen counter.This is love.But I must admit that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” gave me pause when Larson’s work is being workshopped by Stephen Sondheim and a theater critic. Sondheim recognizes the potential in Larson and in the piece, while the critic quickly dismisses it. Seeing the critic’s closed-mindedness and pretentious posturing, I wondered: Have I done that? Have I failed a work of art in this same way?Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Revolution Rent’ Review: Taking the Show South

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      This HBO documentary follows Andy Señor Jr. as he directs a production of “Rent” in Cuba.In the ballad “La Vie Boheme,” a colorful cadre of artists raise a toast to “emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion.” After all, Jonathan Larson’s groundbreaking musical “Rent” embodies revolution. In the earnest though narratively clumsy HBO documentary “Revolution Rent,” a director unpacks the relevance of this joyously defiant show when it’s translated to a different language, culture and political landscape.“Revolution Rent,” directed by Andy Señor Jr. and Victor Patrick Alvarez, depicts Señor’s rocky road to developing Cuba’s first Broadway musical produced by an American company in decades. The film begins with Señor’s background with “Rent” as a performer and his decision, regardless of his family’s protests, to direct a Cuban adaptation. In addition to confronting technical issues, translation adjustments and disagreements among the cast members, Señor is also forced to consider his own heritage and history. Despite the intriguing premise of the film, its cursory and lopsided narrative approach dilutes its salient themes and messages.The film feels scattered, with the first quarter too heavily reliant on abruptly intercut footage of the original Broadway cast performances, and the rest too shallowly dipping into details of the production’s story before skipping along to the next thing.And so Señor’s personal narrative shifts in and out of focus — his relationship to the musical and to his Cuban heritage are detailed just enough to leave us wanting more history, more background, more reflection and more depth. Similarly, the brief glimpses into the lives of its cast members, some queer and many impoverished, are compelling, but inconsistent and over too soon.For a documentary about a substantial staging of a beloved musical, “Revolution Rent” also skimps on the scenes of the final product itself. The production’s Roger singing an impassioned Spanish translation of “One Song Glory”; Señor pushing a cast member into an emotional reckoning with the meaning of the word freedom; the conversations about performing a queer musical in a country that hasn’t had a great track record for its treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. people: These are the kinds of moments that most resonate but are overshadowed by the film’s sporadic approach.The show “Rent” gave us an onstage revolution, while “Revolution Rent” often gives us an underwhelming translation.Revolution RentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on HBO. More

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      Head of New York Theater Workshop to Depart in 2022

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      James C. Nicola, who balanced provocative programming with shows aimed at Broadway, will have served 34 years as artistic director.As the New York theater world points toward reopening, one major force within its nonprofit sector — and a central figure in its often lucrative collaborations with Broadway — is preparing to walk away.James C. Nicola, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, announced on Friday that he will step down in June 2022. At that point, he will have spent 34 years — nearly half his life — at the off-Broadway theater, which spawned the once-in-a-lifetime hit musical “Rent” and grew under his leadership into a steady home for provocative fare by the likes of Caryl Churchill, the Five Lesbian Brothers and the director Ivo van Hove.“I’ve been around long enough to see some of my colleagues carried out of their jobs in a pine box,” Nicola, 71, said on Thursday. “I didn’t want to go that route.”His announcement comes at a time when theaters in New York are grappling with numerous internal and external pressures. Besides the protracted closures related to Covid 19, which has wreaked havoc on theaters’ finances, several groups of theater artists who are Black, Indigenous or people of color have pointed out the overwhelmingly white and male demographics of their artistic leadership, most notably in the “We See You, White American Theater” manifesto that came out in July 2020.One of its demands was that theater leaders should view it as “an act of service to resign” if they have served in the role for more than 20 years — a benchmark that Nicola reached when George W. Bush was president. Nicola is the first prominent New York artistic director to announce his departure since then, and the process of replacing him will undoubtedly be closely watched.Asked about his replacement, Nicola said he would “love to see someone who has the trust and faith of all the constituencies of the community.”Unlike many artistic directors, Nicola was not primarily a stage director himself. He came to New York Theater Workshop in 1988 after stints in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s casting office and at Arena Stage in Washington.In recent years, the workshop has seen several works transfer to Broadway from its airy East Fourth Street theater, including the Tony Award-winning musicals “Once” and “Hadestown”; the acclaimed personal-meets-political memoir “What the Constitution Means to Me”; and “Slave Play,” which is currently nominated for 12 Tonys. (Another transfer, “Sing Street,” was two weeks away from its first preview on Broadway when the Covid-19 lockdown happened.)Nicola — who recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of “Rent,” the theater’s first Broadway transfer, with a starry online fund-raiser — says he is of two minds about the pipeline between commercial and nonprofit theater.“There are many wonderful people in the commercial Broadway world, but I think we’ve become too dependent on their enhancement money,” said Nicola, referring to the funds that commercial Broadway producers will invest in smaller productions with an eye toward larger subsequent productions.“If it’s a large project and it doesn’t have commercial enhancement, it’s probably not going to happen,” he said. “And I think that’s something we as an industry need to be really concerned about.”New York Theater Workshop still plans to present two works that were canceled last year, the Martyna Majok play “Sanctuary City” and a new adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” by Clare Barron.Until that is feasible, the theater has established an ambitious Artistic Instigators program, connecting traditional theater artists, filmmakers and digital artists on projects that subscribers can watch in their evolving states. As Nicola envisions a post-coronavirus theater landscape, he hopes theaters will learn from these innovations.“This year, we had 18,000 people view the ‘Rent 25’ gala from all over the globe,” he said. “Eighteen thousand. That kind of access — it’s hard to imagine not having the capacity to do that going forward. So maybe instead of doing eight shows a week, we do seven live shows and then stream a capture.”Members of the original “Rent” cast during the recent anniversary fundraiser.via New York Theater WorkshopBut those decisions will ultimately fall to his successor. Whoever it is, Nicola will be watching from the sidelines.“I want to absolutely stay out of it,” he said. “I think it’s completely inappropriate to be hovering or hanging out, both during the process and when that person comes in. They shouldn’t have to contend with the old guy.”He said he was at peace with what comes next.“As a child, my dad told me he thought he was going to die at 37,” Nicola said. “He didn’t, but I started thinking the same thing: Was I going to make it past 37? And oddly, I was 37 when I started at New York Theater Workshop. In a certain way, it was like the beginning of my life, not the end.” More

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      A ‘Rent’ Reunion Measures 25 Years of Love and Loss

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookA ‘Rent’ Reunion Measures 25 Years of Love and LossA fund-raiser, a tribute, a documentary — and a reminder that Jonathan Larson’s musical remains especially inspiring in hard times.Members of the original cast sing “No Day but Today” during New York Theater Workshop’s “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love.”Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopMarch 3, 2021Is “Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s 25-year-old groundbreaking musical, somber or celebratory? When I was in high school, in the early throes of my “Rent” obsession, I made my aunt see the show. “That’s so depressing!” she wailed afterward. “No it isn’t!” I insisted. She looked at me like I was crazy.I often think of that exchange, now 14 years later. For me, the adjective “depressing” never fit this musical, which was about so much more than its tragedies: a generation fighting AIDS, poverty, gentrification and the everyday drama and griefs of those 525,600 minutes that make a year.On Tuesday night the New York Theater Workshop hosted “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love,” a virtual fund-raiser commemorating the show, which premiered there in 1996 before going on to Broadway, Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and international renown.It is well known that Larson died just before the musical’s first preview performance. So even though this was a tender, even intimate celebration, the “Rent” event, hosted by the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” contestant Olivia Lux, also embraced loss.Olivia Lux hosted the show, which was at once a documentary, a telethon and a tribute to the “Rent” composer Jonathan Larson.Credit…—-, via New York Theater Workshop“25 Years of Rent,” directed by Andy Señor, worked as a tribute to Larson, a contemporary telethon packed with stage celebs and, most touching, a documentary about the making of the beloved show. The theater summoned him back to life through archival images and footage — a broad-grinned waiter making milkshakes at the Moondance Diner; singing “Will I” on a cassette tape — as well as via recollections from friends, family, performers and the show’s director, Michael Greif.The names involved were impressive enough to light up a marquee: the original cast members Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega, as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annaleigh Ashford, Neil Patrick Harris, Ben Platt, Anaïs Mitchell, Telly Leung and so many more.Some teared up recalling Larson’s exuberance and talents, and described the burden of carrying on with a show whose success he would never see. Of course, this is part of the tragedy of “Rent.”The saying goes that for every death in the world there’s a birth. And as “Rent” was born and grew, so did the careers of the cast members, many of whom were unknowns at the time. Anthony Rapp described working at Starbucks and auditioning with an R.E.M. song, while Idina Menzel, before jumping over the moon or defying gravity, had made a living as a bar mitzvah singer.Fredi Walker-Browne, who played Joanne in the original production, described hearing the lyric to her song “Take Me or Leave Me” for the first time.Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopThe night was also about how Larson’s work helped open people up to themselves. Fredi Walker-Browne, the original Joanne, spoke about first hearing “Take Me or Leave Me,” which Larson wrote for her and Menzel, and feeling that he laced her personality into the lyrics: “I look before I leap/I like margins and discipline/I make lists in my sleep.”Others, like Lux, hailed the show for portraying queerness and drag at a time when many productions didn’t.Winners of Jonathan Larson Grants, awarded to promising early-career musical theater artists, spoke to his legacy. And theater notables who weren’t in “Rent” at its beginnings took on pieces of the score in their own styles. Christopher Jackson’s hymnlike “One Song Glory,” Eva Noblezada’s coquettish “Out Tonight” and Billy Porter’s explosively baroque “I’ll Cover You” were standouts.Among the performers inspired by “Rent” was Billy Porter, who sang “I’ll Cover You.”Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopIf Larson’s death is one side of some karmic exchange, another side is the audiences who used — and continue to use — “Rent” to excavate some hidden part of themselves, and to inspire their own art.So much of this last year has been marked by things unmade: the people unmade by a pandemic, the innocent Black lives unmade by brutality, the planet unmade by a changing climate. My own tiny bubble of a life has gotten smaller, without the chance to see some of my closest friends and where the outside world seems newly and inexplicably dangerous.And yet in recalling the making (and remaking) of “Rent,” the event helped quiet the grief that creeps up on me every day. In the chat box next to the stream, which reached over 6,000 viewers, “Rent” fans confessed to crying; a final group rendition of “Seasons of Love” seemed to push many beyond comforting.It took me a few viewings before I could watch “Rent” without bursting into head-aching, snot-falling ugly crying, but eventually the show became my joy, my comfort. As much as Roger and Mark, a songwriter and filmmaker, hoped to make something of themselves through their art, so did I make myself — in whatever facile way — through “Rent,” using it to shape myself as an artist and an outcast and a New Yorker.At the end of “Rent,” Angel has died but the rest of the bohemians live, and Mark has finally finished his movie. You can read the signature lyric “No day but today” as fatalistic, as the characters’ existential cry, as Larson’s prescience about his sudden death.But I’ve always read “No day but today” — which gets woven into “Seasons of Love” in the show’s finale, and was this event’s final heart-rending hurrah — as a promise: Today I wake up to a new version of myself. I will be magnificent. I account for the losses of yesterday, but today? Today is alive. There’s no tragedy in that.25 Years of Rent: Measured in LoveThrough March 6; nytw.orgAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Birth of ‘Rent,’ Its Creator’s Death and the 25 Years Since

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Birth of ‘Rent,’ Its Creator’s Death and the 25 Years SinceWith a virtual performance marking the Broadway musical’s anniversary, original cast and creative team members talk about losing Jonathan Larson and carrying on his legacy.Jonathan Larson, left, who wrote the music, lyrics and book of “Rent,” with the play’s director, Michael Greif, in 1996.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 25, 2021Updated 3:04 p.m. ETWhat’s 525,600 times 25?It has been 25 years — or, to use a memorable “Seasons of Love” calculation, 13.14 million minutes — since “Rent” upended Broadway’s sense of what musical theater could be. Jonathan Larson’s rock-infused reboot of “La Bohème” had already generated positive chatter during its Off Broadway rehearsals at New York Theater Workshop. But then came full-throated shouts of disbelief and anguish on Jan. 25, 1996, when, hours after the final dress rehearsal, Larson was found dead in his apartment from an aortic aneurysm. He was 35 years old.His shocking death came right before the start of previews, when a creative team typically makes changes based on audience reactions. After briefly considering whether to bring in a script doctor, the team decided instead to streamline Larson’s music and lyrics as needed.The move paid off. Within weeks, “Rent” had achieved a level of hype that would not be rivaled on Broadway until “Hamilton” almost 20 years later: earning rave reviews (The New York Times’s Ben Brantley said it “shimmers with hope for the future of the American musical”); a Pulitzer Prize for Drama; and a frantic transfer to Broadway, where it ran for 12 years and won four Tony Awards.Members of the original Broadway cast in “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love,” which will stream on Tuesday.Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopOn Tuesday, New York Theater Workshop will use its annual fund-raising gala to commemorate the show’s silver anniversary with “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love.” The largely prerecorded virtual performance, available to stream through March 6, will feature most of the original cast, who still communicate regularly in a group chat, along with high-profile “Rent”-heads like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Platt, Billy Porter and Ali Stroker.Members of the original production’s cast and creative team discussed the stratospheric heights and ghastly lows of 1996, remembering the gifted young writer who would have been 61 years old today. Here are the lightly edited excerpts.‘We had to do it for Jonathan’NANCY KASSAK DIEKMANN, former managing director of New York Theater Workshop: Jonathan had the kind of health insurance where he could only go to the emergency room, and he had already been once. They told him it was food poisoning or something, and they sent him home. On the day of the final dress rehearsal, he wasn’t feeling well, and he called to say he was going to take a nap. I said to him, “Jon, why don’t you let me make you an appointment and pay for you to see my doctor?” I always wonder what would have happened if he had gone.JAMES C. NICOLA, artistic director of New York Theater Workshop: Everyone felt a degree of ownership and responsibility to do their absolute best on his behalf. It ceased being a job and became a calling.Anthony Rapp, left, and Adam Pascal in rehearsal at the New York Theater Workshop in 1996.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesANTHONY RAPP, who played Mark: From that last dress rehearsal until mid-July, no one missed a performance. It seemed impossible. No one could. I don’t say that to brag. I just think it showed our level of commitment. We had to do it for Jonathan.MICHAEL GREIF, director: One terrible advantage of being in your mid-30s working on “Rent” was that you had a decade of experience of loss. Jonathan’s death made him part of the community he was honoring.ADAM PASCAL, who played Roger: People are often surprised to hear this, but I only knew Jonathan for about four weeks. I was cast in December, and he died in January. I grieved the loss on behalf of his family, who we got to know afterward. But I personally miss him the way the public misses him. I miss the music that never got written.‘We did a lot of cutting’NICOLA: Four of us met the day after Jonathan died — me, Michael Greif, Tim Weil and Lynn Thomson [the dramaturge]. And one thing that came up was, “Should we bring in another composer/writer to finish the job? Is that the choice that has integrity?” But we quickly decided against it.TIM WEIL, musical supervisor: Our idea was, “Let’s do what Jonathan wanted us to do,” even if we couldn’t know exactly what that was.GREIF: We did a lot of cutting. We cut things that we felt Jonathan would agree to or even advocate cutting.RAPP: I think Jonathan was raring to go for the preview process. It would have been very discombobulating and weird for morale to have a foreigner — I mean that artistically, not xenophobically — come in at that point.DIEKMANN: Tim had to step up on the musical side, and he did. He and Michael knew what Jonathan wanted — because, God knows, he was there all the time.WEIL: I still continue to make little bitty changes for new productions, since it has always been tailored to specific performers. I think I’m the only one who has that kind of license.‘Everything was just coming at us’WILSON JERMAINE HEREDIA, who played Angel: Everything was just coming at us, and there was a part of me that was on automatic pilot. The only thing that felt safe and constant was going back on that stage every night. The most stable thing was that it was happening to all of us.DAPHNE RUBIN-VEGA, who played Mimi: Today is 12 weeks out from a partial knee replacement for me. And part of me is like, “How did I get here?” But I know exactly how I got here: by playing Mimi eight times a week.RAPP: I have weird little nagging injuries that still bother me from carrying around that video camera for two hours straight.Daphne Rubin-Vega, who played Mimi in the original cast, with Adam Pascal, who played Rodger. Credit…via New York Theater Workshop‘Representation really matters’GREIF: The idealism and openheartedness of the piece, which I was very wary of at the time and found myself guarding against, has had a profound impact on very, very young people. I’m talking 12- and 13-year-olds. And in many ways, “Rent” opened the door to the possibility of the musicals I went on to direct, musicals like “Next to Normal” and “Dear Evan Hansen.”RUBIN-VEGA: Representation really matters, and it was important for a woman who looks like me to be thrust into that ingénue role.PASCAL: It is something that I’m clearly forever connected to. And it is something that is still literally paying the rent. Do you know about Cameo? Earlier today, I did five Cameos where I sang “Rent” songs.NICOLA: I am just now able to hear these songs without any baggage or context — just hear them as musical theater songs. And I’m thinking, “These are really good songs.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More