La Vie Bohème

Theatre people sometimes ask me why New Line doesn't use a dramaturg. It's because text analysis and background research is my favorite pastime.

I know, I'm a freak. You don't have to tell me.

For every show, I spend our entire rehearsal process reading material related to the show. I read Bukowski's novels while working on Bukowsical. During Next to Normal, I read a memoir about a brain researcher who herself had symptoms very similar to Diana's in the show. During Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, I read several books about Jackson and the politics of the early 1800s. Not only does my reading help me in various ways in our creative process, but it also keeps the show swimming around in my head 24-7 while we work.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

So here's what I'm been reading as we work on Rent.

Years ago, shortly after the show had opened, they published a Rent coffee table book, which included some terrific interviews, bios, great photos, and the entire text of the show. I read this when it first came out in 1997, but I haven't yet returned to it. I don't want the original production to become too prominent in my head as long as I'm still blocking the show. We finish blocking next week, so then I think I'll go back to this book. I remember the interviews all being really interesting, and they might well give me important insights.

I'm also re-reading the novel Rent is based on, Scenes de la Vie de Bohème, re-titled The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter in its English translation. I know everybody thinks Rent is based on the opera La Bohème, but it's not. Several years ago, when I was writing a chapter about Rent for my book Rebels with Applause, I watched a video of the opera and I read the novel; and I'm here to tell you, this musical is way closer to the novel than the opera. In fact, Rent is not much at all like the very gloomy, moody, weepy, joyless opera version.

Jonathan Larson constantly stressed that Rent was a celebration of life. That's definitely what the novel is, but that's not at all what the tear-jerker opera is.

(One word of caution – if you buy a copy of the novel on Amazon, don't buy the hardcover version; the cheap-ass binding falls apart really easily. The softcover doesn't seem to have that problem. Also, the book had been out of print, but this reprint is really cheap. Both the hardcover and softcover editions leave out Chapter II and instead they print the first chapter a second time, under the title of the second chapter. You can find the second chapter online, or buy an older used copy and you won't have that problem.)

I'm also reading Marc Spitz' Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the 90s. This is a really cool, first-hand account of going through almost everything Roger goes through in Rent, including artistic blocks, woman trouble, heroin addiction, running away from New York, etc. It's been really helpful for me to get an intimate look at the real people in this community at exactly the time Rent is set. Plus, it's just a great read.

I'm also reading Anthony Rapp's Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent. I bought this when it first came out in 2006, but I never read it. So now I'm reading it. The most valuable part for me is his chronicle of the rehearsal and shaping process, and the quotes of what Larson and director Michael Greif talked to the actors about.

As an example, Greif told Rapp and Adam Pascal this about the title song:

I want you to think of this less as just as expression of anger and frustration, and more of an attempt to entertain yourself and your friend. You guys are freezing, and you're dancing around to keep yourself warm. You're sort of laughing at your own plight. You're dancing on your grave. . . Also, really ask the question: how are you guys going to pay the rent? Really ask it. Don't just rant and complain about it.

Rapp then writes about the impact of Greif's direction:

He went back to his seat, and Tim played the opening chords. I sang, immediately feeling a lighter touch, and feeling how right that was. The whole song became much more arch and sardonic, less nakedly angry, but without losing the inherent frustration that fueled it.

What's most fun about reading this section is that Rapp also gives us a first draft of the lyric to this song, and it's really angry:

If I throw my body out the window,
Brains all splattered, guts all steaming in the snow,
I wouldn't have to finish shooting video
No one wants to show...

Even though the tone of this early lyric is wrong for Rent, it still shows Larson's craftsmanship. Notice the alteration of all the S's in the second line, in brains, splattered, guts, steaming, and snow; and the use of long O sounds in the last two lines, with video, no, and show; and almost subliminal, all the W sounds, in window, wouldn't, one, and wants.

Rapp also gives us such a wonderful, personal glimpse of who Jonathan Larson was (it almost seems like he was the emotional model for Angel). At one point in the book, Larson has invited the cast to dinner, and he says to them:

I am so grateful to the New York Theatre Workshop, and to all of you who are a part of this show. This is one of the greatest things that's ever happened to me, getting this production together. It's been a very long time coming. I wrote this show about my life. About the lives of my friends. And some of my friends are gone. And I really miss them. I guess I just wanted to say that you all are going to bring my friends to life, and I wanted to thank you for that. I wanted to thank you all for being my new friends.

After hearing of Larson's death, Rapp writes:

I felt wildly crazy and perfectly calm at once. Jonathan's death made bizarre sense; he'd not been well, he'd gotten this show out of him, which was the most important thing he'd ever done, the biggest expression of himself he could ever put out in to the world, and when he was done, he'd died.

There were times when I was reading this book that tears were streaming down my face. It's so powerfully emotional, so nakedly honest, but that's also what Rent is, right?

Many productions of Rent just create a carbon-copy of the original production. I don't think we're in any danger of that with the New Line production, but striking out on our own path makes it doubly important for me to understand this story, these characters, and Larson's intentions for his story.

The various books I'm reading right now help me enormously with all that. And really, the novel is one of the funniest books I've ever read, so it's a real pleasure returning to that. It makes me laugh over the people who don't like Rent because many of the characters are whiny and irresponsible (something I address in another blog post); they should get a load of the characters in the novel, who are far more whiny, irresponsible, lazy, dishonest, amoral, and hilariously selfish. And yet, you still love spending time with them.

Kinda like Zak Farmer.

Our top priority with every show is to tell this story as clearly as possibly. Reading all these books will help me do that. Some theatre people think all you need is the words on the page. I think that's genuinely stupid and lazy. Unless you're doing a show by a really lazy, simple-minded writer, there's going to be more to a show than what's on the surface of the words. And there's a lot more in Rent.

We're almost done blocking Act I. Next rehearsal, we stage "La Vie Boheme." Ack!

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Food of Love, Emotion, Mathematics, Isolation, Rhythm, Power, Feeling, Harmony

It's been such fun going through music rehearsals with the Rent score. I've been in love with this music since I first heard it from the tenth row, dead center, of the Nederlander Theatre in July 1996.

Because it's Rent, we had an incredible turnout at auditions, and so we got to cast the absolute cream of young St. Louis talent. Listening to these folks sing these songs is already a thrill, and I can only imagine how much more amazing they'll all be after a few weeks of blocking and conversation and run-throughs. And blogging.

When I first started seriously playing through the score again and prepping for rehearsals, I noticed there are several little bits that aren't on the cast album. And I always forget about them. I haven't seen Rent in its original version in a long time. I really wasn't planning to work on Rent anytime soon, but now that I am, I'm glad I haven't seen it in a while. Much of it is pretty powerfully imprinted on my brain, but the farther away I get my mind from the original the better, I think.

I wrote about Rent in my book Rebels with Applause, but you can never get as close to a show as when you're working on it. Reading the score really closely as Justin teaches the actors is a real trip. There are so many little things in the vocal lines that are pretty different from what we're all used to on the original cast album. And in every case so far, what Jonathan Larson wrote is cooler and more interesting than what that original cast sang. There are some wonderful blues notes, variations of melody, unexpected turns and intervals. In a lot of cases, the Broadway actors had regularized rhythms or "corrected" Larson's blues notes and "wrong" notes (intentional dissonance).

So we're putting all that stuff back the way Larson wrote it. My bet is that most productions imitate the vocal quirks of the cast album and ignore (or don't notice) what Larson wrote, so some Rent fans may find some cool musical Easter Eggs in our production.

I'm telling our actors that when they're singing solos, I want them to learn exactly what's on the page, understand what Jonathan wrote, what mattered to him in the music, and then as their performances evolve, they can take some liberties and let it be a little freer. A little.

In other words, freer than with a Sondheim score, not as free as Hair or Grease. The score essentially straddles those two worlds.

And it only now occurs to me as I type this that that's exactly what Jonathan Larson was aiming to achieve with Rent and all the later work of his we'll never see – the artistry and intelligence of Sondheim and Prince's concept musicals (just look at Tick... Tick... BOOM!), and the soul and emotion of rock and roll.

Larson wanted to move the art form forward and he did, by re-engaging with musical theatre past, and like other great artists, creating something entirely new from old building blocks. Rent looked back to the dramatic structure of the Rodgers & Hammerstein model, but also to the experimentation of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, and the concept musicals of the 70s.

Like Oklahoma! fifty years earlier, the triumph of Rent was in bringing together what had gone before it, combining many past innovations all into one new work, and doing it with great skill, and more important, great commercial success. Innovations in the art form usually only get carried forward if they show up in hit shows. In fact, Larson’s great achievement and the reason for Rent’s enormous appeal to so many different kinds of people lies precisely in the heady mix of musical theatre traditionalism and innovation.

Larson borrowed from the musicals of the 20s and 30s and the work of the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and others, by writing in a genuine pop music style, a style that the audience hears in their everyday lives, a style that instantly makes the language of the musical accessible to the untrained ear. Surely today, no one can escape rock/pop music. It’s in the movies, in commercials, even in dentists’ offices. And like the songwriters of the 20s and 30s did, Larson tells his story in the musical language of the people, something Broadway had rarely done (or at least rarely done well) since the 1950s.

Larson also followed the lead of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s early musicals (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific) by telling a story that directly addresses important social issues and problems. And as in Oklahoma!, Larson’s story is about a threat to the community; in Oklahoma! it’s Jud Fry, in Rent it’s AIDS. He used long-form musical scenes, which were first developed by Hammerstein, in Show Boat with Jerome Kern, and in Oklahoma! and Carousel with Richard Rodgers, a device perfected by Larson’s mentor Stephen Sondheim, most notably in Passion and Sweeney Todd. (And like Sondheim did in Sweeney, Larson even quoted the dies irae, a musical motif from the mass for the dead, in the song “La Vie Boheme.” He also mentioned Sondheim by name in that song.)

Larson also learned from Hammerstein’s example that the truly great writers always write what they believe. Sondheim wrote about psychologically complex, neurotic New Yorkers because that’s what he knows and understands. Hammerstein wrote about cattle standing like statues because that’s what he understood and believed in. And like Hammerstein, Larson wrote with tremendous optimism, an almost embarrassing naivété, and a genuine love of life, because that’s who he was, despite living in the midst of the AIDS pandemic and watching many of his closest friends die. But like Sondheim, Larson also focused more than anything else on the way people connect (and fail to connect), one of the most important themes in Rent and a theme Sondheim returned to in almost every one of his shows.

Larson also followed in the footsteps of West Side Story in depicting the seamy, gritty side of life on the streets of New York, and in the footsteps of William Finn’s Falsettos trilogy in his matter-of-fact treatment of gay characters. Like Grand Hotel and Into the Woods, Larson successfully manipulated numerous storylines, weaving them in and out of each other. He followed Cabaret and Company in their treatment of social issues and their use of commentary songs. And he and director Michael Greif followed the lead of The Fantasticks and A Chorus Line by using virtually no set.

And yet, despite all those influences, Rent is so entirely original, so unlike any other show. Other writers had done many of these things before, but no one had combined all these elements into something so new that spoke so forcefully to the zeitgeist.

After writing six books on the history and evolution of the American musical theatre, I can see all of it in Rent, from the art form's earliest experiments to its most recent. Larson was a true Broadway baby, he knew and loved the old shows deeply, and he contributed so much to our art form in his short life and career. Like Moses, Larson couldn't go with us into the promised land of this new Golden Age, but he left us a great road map, and thanks to his adventuring, we now have Spring Awakening, Next to Normal, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Murder Ballad, Lizzie, American Idiot, and other amazing shows that can all trace their lineage straight back to Jonathan Larson.

And now we New Liners get to travel down that road and see where it leads us. Rent will take us somewhere different in 2014 from where it took us in 1996, but Jonathan will still be there with us on the ride.

We're only about a third of the way through our process, but it's already been such an incredible experience. I can't wait to share it with our audiences.

The adventure continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Truth Like a Blazing Fire

Last week, The New Yorker published a really terrific, lengthy interview with President Obama by David Remnick. It's the kind of very personal, almost confessional interview that we rarely get from sitting Presidents. In the interview, Remnick asks Obama if he thinks his race has something to do with the rabid opposition to him and his ideas.

Obama says in his usual (overly?) thoughtful way:

There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President. There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues. You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. And so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy.

Nuance. Gray area. Complexity.

But nuance is Kryptonite to many conservatives. (If you wanna know why, read The Republican Brain.) So this week, the conservative media-industrial complex erupted with sputtering outrage that Obama was "playing the race card" again. No matter that Remnick brought it up. No matter that Obama presented both sides of the issue. No matter that Obama warned liberals not to see racism in all opposition. No matter that Fox Noise's own Glenn Beck warned us back in 2009 that President Obama is hard-core racist and has "a deep-seated hatred for white people and the white culture"...

It was really interesting working on the all-black musical Passing Strange in 2011 in the midst of the Obama Presidency and the 2012 campaign, because it made me think about race a lot. We work very hard at New Line to have racially diverse casts (it's rare that we have an all-white cast), but even though many of us thought the Obama Presidency would move us forward in terms of race, what it's actually done is pick off the scab from a wound that was never really healed.

For all the same reasons, it was fascinating working on Hair in 2008 (closing just a few days before we elected Obama the first time), but it was sobering to realize that all the issues in Hair, race, war, sexism, drugs, etc., are all still unsolved today. Forty years after Hair debuted, it seemed we've barely moved forward at all.

And it's just as interesting working on Rent right now. Though Rent is not about race explicitly, its requirement of a multi-racial cast does make a statement. And the current Republican war on voting rights for people of color, on healthcare rights for women, on organized labor, all make the issues in Rent as fresh and raw and immediate as ever.

Of course, Rent will give Republicans heartburn for other reasons too. Like Hair, Rent is about a lot beyond its central theme of community and interconnectedness. It is inherently political. After all, Rent is all about the 47%, people of color, poor folks, the homeless, sexual minorities, political activists – all the people who scare the shit out of Republicans. Capitalists are definitely the bad guys in Larson's world. From Larson's perspective, Benny has crossed over to the Dark Side. If Rent were set now instead of the mid-1990s, you know many of these characters would have joined the Occupy Wall Street movement, all of them would have voted for Obama, and Angel and Collins would be married.

Kinda makes me wanna strap Rick Santorum into a theatre seat and make him watch our show. I'll even supply the valium.

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, and that made me think about what he would think of Rent. I can only assume he would find great joy and optimism in it, and a kindred social activist of sorts in Jonathan Larson. Among the residents of Rentworld, we are judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. Those who would judge us by our appearance (like most of the parents) are the outsiders here, the ones who just don't get it. (Then again, can we blame them? They don't have Angel to guide them.)

Today, as Republicans try to shatter our social safety net, massively cutting food stamps, refusing to extend unemployment benefits, refusing to expand Medicaid in many states, I realize that the characters in our show are exactly the ones who suffer most from the GOP's Every-Man-for-Himself philosophy. It really does take a village for these people. They survive only through community, through collective responsibility. They are the United States of America in microcosm, individuals each on his own path, but like our young nation, mutually pledging to each other "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Part of me wishes we were doing Rent in October. I mean, how could anyone spend time with Angel, Collins, and the gang, and then go out and vote Republican...? How could you vote for the people who don't want to fund HIV/AIDS research after watching Angel, Collins, Roger, and Mimi all live with this disease?

We say that New Line produces only "politically and socially relevant" musical theatre. Though Rent is not ostentatiously political, politics is woven into the thread of every plot line in the show. These are issues America has never really been able to get past. Making art like Rent is one way we grapple with these issues, think about them, humanize them; it's the way we find the divine in ourselves and the humanity in each other. And that's where change comes from.

Listening to our read-through-sing-through of the whole show last night really drove home for me the weight and power of this story. There's a reason this show won the Pulitzer Prize.

Angel isn't an Obi Wan Kenobi just for Mark, Roger, and the gang – she's also here for us. And we need her. God bless Jonathan Larson for giving us a wise wizard with a killer beat and fabulous drag. It's about time.

We start blocking the show now. I can't wait to see how my ideas work when they're out of my head and onstage. I'm pretty psyched to get to work. Stay tuned...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

It's Creation.

Since we first announced Rent, several people have said to me some variation of "I hate Rent. Those characters are all selfish, whiny brats!"

These people are not entirely wrong. But they're also missing a lot.

Yes, this is a coming-of-age story, and as I wrote in my last post, a coming-of-age story requires a central character (or characters) who have not yet come of age. If the kids in Rent were all well-adjusted and wise, there'd be no story to tell. Remember what a whiny bitch Luke Skywalker is when we first meet him on Tatooine? And though we don't really see it, it's strongly implied early in The Wizard of Oz that Dorothy is a real pain in the ass. The whole point of The Fantasticks is that Matt and Luisa refuse to grow up, so it's forced on them by El Gallo. And really, the whole point of High Fidelity is that Rob's a dick, and he needs to grow up and stop being a dick.

Every protagonist in every story has to learn something. In Rent, these kids need to learn to see beyond their own selves, their own lives, their own immediate wants; to learn that we're all interconnected, we're all responsible for each other, or as Sondheim put it so elegantly, "Careful, no one is alone."

It's not important that an audience consciously recognize all this stuff. Hero Myth stories work because we instinctively recognize the elements of the story, even if only subconsciously, as elements of our own lives. The hero's journey is always a metaphor for a human life. But it helps the actors and me to recognize these elements so we can tell this story as clearly as possible. Some directors and actors believe all you have to do is say/sing the words and the rest will take care of itself. I think that's wrong, and I think it leads to a lot of very shallow, unsatisfying theatre. The more we understand the storytelling, the better we tell the story. Just by "underlining" a word, just by adding a pause to let something sink in for a second, we can make the important stuff clearer and help the audience get the most out of the story.

Angel is the wise wizard in this collective hero myth story. She's almost other-worldly in her zen-like understanding of the world around her, her wisdom, her compassion. She's there to teach the others (and us) a valuable lesson, to see the world in terms of what we can give instead of what we can get. As Collins says to Roger in Act II, "Angel helped us believe in love. I can't believe you disagree."

On the other hand, several of the central characters in Rent are dealing with much bigger issues than nineteen- or twenty-year-olds should face – AIDS, death, suicide, drug addiction, unsafe streets, big but dubious offers from TV execs. How many college-age kids ever grapple with anything like that? To call Roger, Collins, or Angel "whiny" misses the entire point of the story.

I have this theory that the people who hate Rent see their younger selves in these characters and they don't like that. After all, most of us are whiny and selfish when you're young (and we artsies can be the worst); we still have growing up left to do. Though to be honest, a lot of people in their forties still have growing up to do.

I can't help but see a parallel to American politics today. At the beginning of our story, these kids are the Republican Party: I want what I want, and if the other guy also gets what he wants, that's fine, but don't ask me for any. They have to grow up and become more like the Democratic Party, believing that caring for "the least of these" makes us all better off.

Angel teaches her friends to be more Christ-like.

After all, Rent is about "the least of these," the poor, the outcasts, the sick, the rejected, you know, the folks Jesus hung out with. For much of the twentieth century, Alphabet City has been where mainstream society's rejects form their own community, their own support system, to some extent even their own economy. It's the place where Mark can toast, "To being an us for once, instead of a them." It's a place where Mark can ask, "Is anyone in the mainstream?" because he knows the answer is no. Not here.

And the extra comic punch of that line, delivered amongst a racially and sexually diverse crowd of proud and loud misfits, is that in our production it also applies to New Line itself, to the production you'll be watching as Jeremy (our "Mark") sings those words.

Maybe the most potent part of the magic of Rent – and make no mistake, Rent is genuinely, inexplicably mystical in the same way that Hair is – is that its production requires the same kind of community the show depicts. Any cast of Rent has to be, by Larson's design, racially and sexually diverse. And that's why performing and watching Rent can be so powerful – the sense of community and the intense emotions aren't just realistic; they're real. The actors aren't just portraying all that; they're living it onstage.

Which is the ultimate goal of any good actor, right?

And with our production, that built-in reality will be even more intense, because the connection between actors and audience is so much more palpable  in a theatre with only seven rows of seats. I wrote in a blog post during Next to Normal:

We're very lucky at New Line because we've always worked in small spaces. Though our current space is a little larger, at 210 seats, it's very intimate because there are only seven rows. And that gives us the luxury of more subtle acting, not as minimalist as film acting, but (depending on the show) still pretty subtle. As I often tell our actors, you don't have to "show" the audience how your character feels; you have to just feel it. We humans are amazingly skilled at reading human faces. It's what we do all day. So even the tiniest, most subtle changes in a face are easy to read, because we all get so much practice at it.

And it's pretty easy to "just feel it" when you're working on Rent. Some of these songs are already really powerful, and we've only had a week of music rehearsals.

Not only will our audience be close to the stage, but our cast will be up and down the aisles, and all over the theatre. My two favorite things in the theatre, the things that truly delight me, are chaos and surprise. We aim to deliver a lot of both. I want our audience to feel that thunderbolt I felt in 1996 watching Rent on Broadway, that visceral, raw, unpolished, uncontrolled, rock and roll energy that Michael Greif so brilliantly conjured up.

When I saw the 2011 revival, it was a genuine thrill to come back to this beautiful show, but it was even a greater thrill to really get to experience it "for the first time" again, with Michael Greif's radically different, equally brilliant restaging.

I hope we can deliver even half that big a thrill to our audiences. I hope that people who've seen Rent before will get that same feeling I got when they see our show, like they're seeing Rent for the first time again. I've worked out a lot of the staging already and I feel really good about where I'm taking us, but there's still a lot of work to do.

And miles to go before I sleep...

The opposite of war isn't peace. It's creation.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

No Day but Today

So everything kinda got put on hold for a week as Mother Nature dumped a shit-ton of snow on us... Fucking bitch!

I thought some of our actors were gonna have aneurysms over our artistic coitus interruptus. They were so wildly, freakishly psyched about starting (including multiple countdowns on Facebook), and then we all had to sit and wait a week.

But tonight, barring a pop-up tornado, we will begin.

And there are some challenges ahead. First, this is one of those shows that's too famous. I remember when we started working on Grease in 2007, I had to strip away everything we carried with us, all our preconceptions about Grease, before we could really start. Grease had been changed over the years, by the kinder, gentler film version, the clueless, dumbed-down revivals and tours, and bland high school and community theatre productions. My intention was to return the show to its roots, but that required all of us to let go of everything we thought we knew about Grease – including me, who had already done the show twice (directing it once) and had seen the film over a hundred times.

The same is true of Rent. We're all (me included) so used to the way the original cast sang everything on the cast album, but as I've been playing through the score, I see lots of things that the original cast sang differently from what's written. And we'll have to fix some of those things.

Now, this isn't Sweeney Todd and it doesn't require the same kind of precise adherence to the written score. This is rock and roll, and some liberties can be taken. I'd even argue liberties must be taken to sing this rock score with complete authenticity. Rent doesn't allow for the kind of liberties we can take with Rocky Horror or Grease, but there is some room here for our actors to "personalize" their songs.

The other challenge is the original production as a whole. Most community theatre groups who produce Rent stage it almost exactly like the original. The commercial video that was released of the final night on Broadway is wonderful to have, but it poses a danger too.

The reason we haven't produced Rent before now is that I've always worshipped at the shrine of Michael Greif's original staging, having seen the original Broadway production just a few months after it opened. But the revival cured me of that, and now I feel free to meet Rent on its own terms. But that means we're gonna do some things with the staging that are very different from the original, and for those in the cast who know that original staging well (or who've actually done the original staging in some production), it may be a bit scary or at least disorienting.

Tonight when I welcome the cast to our first rehearsal, I'll lay out my approach to the show and I'll remind them that we're not doing the original staging... or the original costumes or anything else. I'm even considering shifting Angel's death slightly later in Act II (without changing any words or music).

On the other hand, there may be times when the original staging really is the best way to stage a particular moment, or times when I get stuck, and the original staging may offer me a way out. I won't reflexively reject everything about the original production (for instance, I think our "Seasons of Love" may be staged exactly like the original), but it will not be our guide in any way.

I've been doing some cool reading lately – Anthony Rapp's Rent memoir Without You; the original novel the show is based on, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème; and a very cool memoir by a guy who literally lived this life in Alphabet City in the early and mid-1990s, Poseur. It's been really fun, reading these very different books that all converge on Rent. I'm getting some very cool insider info on what Greif told his actors, what Larson intended, etc., but also the heart and soul of these characters. The hero of Poseur goes through many of the things the Rent characters endure, including heroin addiction.

Since we announced that we're doing Rent, the response has been overwhelming. Our presale is already massively record-breaking – we've never sold this many tickets this far in advance. Not even close. But also, I've had some people tell me they just don't like Rent, that the characters are selfish and self-involved. I think these folks miss the point of the story. If all the characters are nice, balanced, enlightened people when our story begins, then there's no story to tell. These characters have to learn something, to go on a journey. They have to Grow Up. Just like Rob in High Fidelity and the Youth in Passing Strange.

Rent is about all the socio-political things many people (including me) have written about. But it's also a six-way hero myth story, as each of our heroes is forced to face the complexities and obstacles of adult life. They each have to learn that childhood, when we get what we want and people take care of us, is over. They have to learn and grow – and face themselves – to become complete adults. That's the throughline of the show and we can't ever lose track of that. Like High Fidelity and Passing Strange, this is a coming-of-age story.

In this hero myth, Angel is the wise wizard figure (and as in most hero myths, the wise wizard is not able to finish the hero's journey with him), and community is their magic amulet that protects them (like Luke's light saber or Dorothy's ruby slippers). They are all each other's traveling companions down this urban yellow brick road. And like some hero myths, they must travel to the "underworld" (figuratively for some of them, literally for others), and then return with newfound wisdom.

Despite the despairing wails from those who think rock and roll ruined musical theatre, who think "They just don't write 'em like they used to," I fully believe that Rent is a masterpiece, easily worthy of the Pulitzer Prize and all the other many honors the show received.

The prep is over. It's time to do this.

No day but today!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Rent!

So why hasn't New Line produced Rent before now?

I'll tell you the truth. In July 1996, before anyone outside New York had heard a note of the score, before Playbill.com and internet theatre journalism, less than two months after it had transferred to Broadway, I sat in the Nederlander Theatre, in the tenth row, dead center, and I had my mind blown by this new rock musical called Rent.

New Line was five years old.

I knew by the end of the title song that I was seeing something truly extraordinary, truly new, truly ground-breaking, intensely American. Later, thinking about it, I realized that Rent was transforming the Rodgers & Hammerstein model for the new millennium. The overall narrative structure and many of the storytelling devices follow the R&H rules. But the score follows the rules of opera, with arias, duets, trios, counterpoint, and recitative. And yet the musical language is 1990s alt pop. Rent's creator Jonathan Larson was reinventing the art form to speak to a new age. And he wasn't the only one.

It was the beginning of a new Golden Age of the American musical theatre and I had just witnessed it.

By the end of that performance, I knew the list of the Great American Musicals had just grown by one. Show Boat, Carousel, West Side Story, Hair, Company, A Chorus Line, and now Rent. Just a few years later, Ragtime would join their ranks. The musical theatre suddenly was not just rejuvenated but on fire! Just in the period between Rent's first readings at New York Theatre Workshop and its Broadway opening, so many other amazing shows first opened, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Passion, Avenue X, Violet (all in 1994), Songs for a New World, Splendora, Faust, Bring on da Noise, Bring on da Funk (all in 1995), and Floyd Collins (1996). It was a new day.

Jonathan Larson had two lifetime agendas. First, to heal the divide between theatre music and popular music. And though he didn't live to see it, he began a trend which is finally blossoming now, and that divide is finally fading away, as we see theatre scores by John Melloncamp, Cyndi Lauper, Bono and the Edge, and coming soon, The Pogues. Theatre music and pop music overlapped a lot in the 1920s and 30s, but the Rodgers & Hammerstein model couldn't accommodate rock and roll. Then in the late 60s and 70s, rock and roll split musical theatre in two. Now all those wounds are being healed, thanks in large part to Jonathan Larson.

Larson's second goal was to write a new Hair, a show that captured his times as fully as Hair captured the end of the sixties, and that captured a community – and by extension, the country – at a pivotal point in our cultural and political history. And he certainly did all that. He probably didn't know his show would become a massive cultural phenomenon, every bit as pervasive and iconic as Hair, and every bit as transformative for his beloved art form. Larson didn't live long, but he single-handedly changed the direction of the American musical theatre. Arguably, Rent began the new Golden Age we're in today.

Without Rent, there's no Next to Normal, American Idiot, or Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson...

But I never wanted to work on Rent myself.

When the rights became available a number of years ago, I thought about it. It's clearly a New Line show, right? But I thought that original production was so perfect, so exactly right, I couldn't imagine the show any other way. But what's the fun in reproducing someone else's staging? I just couldn't bring myself to violate this show, or to copy Michael Greif's staging, and so I didn't want to work on it.

And then in fall 2011, fifteen years after first seeing Rent, I went to see the off Broadway revival. I was a little apprehensive. It couldn't possibly be as good as the original, right?

And then it was.

Everything about the revival was different from the original. Every detail, not just the sets and other design elements, but the style of staging, fundamental elements of character, everything. With one exception. "Seasons of Love" was staged exactly as it was in 1996. Which was exactly right.

And yet I found the show every bit as thrilling, as powerful, as raw, as emotionally naked as the original. It was like getting to see Rent for the first time, one more time. Over and over during the show, I found tears running down my cheeks – not during sad parts, but just because the emotion of seeing Rent again was so overwhelming for me. Two-thirds of the audience were singing along, and so after a while, I did too. I can't imagine what that was like for the actors. I bet that'll happen to us too.

One thing that really struck me was how young all the leads were. I mean, young. And that made all the sad parts so much sadder, that these kids have to deal with all this...

It wasn't until after seeing the revival, later that night, that I looked more closely at the Playbill and saw that the revival was directed by the same guy who had directed the original, Michael Greif. How did he do that? How did he stage this complex piece so perfectly, in two totally different ways?

The more I thought about it in the days following, the more I realized Greif had taught me a valuable lesson. There isn't only one way to stage Rent. The original production was brilliant and transcendent, and other approaches can also be brilliant and transcendent, because the material is just that rich. And then I thought, maybe it's time for New Line to do Rent.

As it's been swimming around in my head over the past year, I've accumulated dozens of ideas written on scraps of paper that I need to transfer into my script, and one image really took over my thoughts. A big, raked, circular platform in the middle of the stage, painted like the moon. I honestly don't know where that image came from. Maybe it came subconsciously from Maureen's performance art piece (she will be doing it on this moon platform), but I don't think so. I think it's more about the primal symbolism of the moon – which is different in each religion and mythology. So much of this story happens at night, like a lot of Shakespeare's darker comedies.

Here's a first sketch from our set designer Rob Lippert. The moon platform is twelve feet across.

As I've thought about how I'm gonna stage Rent, it's become more and more clear to me that Rent really is a new Hair. They're not identical, and Rent is far more about narrative, but they share so much. And I realize that everything I learned about Hair, having directed it three times, having talked to members of the original production, and having written a whole book about it, all that will inform our Rent. Larson was too talented and too much of a visionary to just write another Hair. Instead, Rent is a response to Hair across time, a conversation with Hair about theatre and storytelling and music, but also about culture and politics. Like Hair was in 1968, Rent embodies the Culture War, with its racial diversity, its sexual diversity, its criticism of capitalism and other institutions (even MTV!), and its insistence that we only survive together, that community is everything.

They say the great political divide in America today is between those who believe in "big government" and those who believe in "limited government." But that formulation misses the point. We are "government." There are many things we can do better together than on our own – repairing roads, putting out fires, building dams, making sure food and medicine are safe, and so much else. Government is just the act of deciding how we want to live together. The real but unstated debate here is between those who believe we are our brother's keeper and those who believe it's every man for himself. Ironically, those in the latter category still use the roads and bridges the rest of us built. Even more ironically, it's usually those who claim a belief in Jesus that don't believe we have any responsibility for each other's welfare.

Larson believed in community. Larson said that Rent is about celebrating life, even in the face of death. And a celebration takes people.

Like theatre.

I've written at the top of the first page in my script, "CELEBRATION OF LIFE." But Rent isn't just about celebrating life and the idea of living fully. It's more specifically about celebrating people, real human connection. That's what all the various subplots are about – connecting, holding on, letting go, and as Angel teaches us, the most important of all, giving.

We thought politics and culture were divisive in the 1990s when Rent debuted, but now that just looks like a rehearsal for the Obama years. We need Rent's healing now more than ever. We need its idealism and joy and big, big heart. In these times of cutting services to the working poor, trying to keep people of color from voting, rolling back women's reproductive rights, and attacks on the social safety net, we need to hear Angel's voice. We need her wisdom. Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, “At so divisive a time in our country’s culture, Rent shows signs of revealing a large, untapped appetite for something better.”

Before he died, Larson wrote this about his show, “In these dangerous times, where it seems the world is ripping apart at the seams, we can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day and we should reach out to each other and bond as a community, rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium.”

Rent is Jonathan Larson's call for compassion, empathy, connection, community, humanity. No elaborate trick sets, no self-referential parody, no cheap shocks. Just pure, sweet, complicated humanity. That's what musicals do best, after all. And Larson was thinking about the art form as much as he was thinking about his show.

His premature death is very sad, but luckily for us, he left us a masterpiece.

Sunday night, the cast of New Line's Rent will go to work on that masterpiece. I can't wait.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott