“What is the allure of Rent?” The Daily Cardinal, April 2000

In bringing Rent to Madison (April 18-23), Fred Frank, president of Frank Productions, says the most obvious attraction for the touring company to stop here is the UW campus. Were the show not calculating in its appeal to youthful audiences — and its alienation of segments of the traditional Broadway crowd — such a statement, especially in light of recent turnouts for musicals in Madison, would be dubious to say the least.

Rent brings to the stage the gritty issues of drug addiction, gay and lesbian sex, AIDS and S & M dancing with an abundance of four-letter words. That these elements so conspicuously place Rent in the vanguard of contemporary musical theater says more about the irrelevance of the Broadway stage as a vehicle for expressing contemporary themes than it does about the presumed audacity of the production.

Composer-playwright Jonathan Larson had an oft-stated ambition to reinvent and recast the moribund musical. WithRent he did that. But in the larger context of American popular entertainment, Rent may seem conventional at best, contrived at worst.

© 2000
Stephen Andrew Miles