Director Chris Columbus (“Mrs. Doubtfire,” the first two “Harry Potter” movies) has faithfully adapted Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-and Tony Award-winning Broadway musical for the big screen, using all but two of the principal cast members from the original stage production. The newcomers are Rosario Dawson (as exotic dancer Mimi Marquez) and Tracie Thoms (lesbian lawyer Joanne Jefferson), and neither flubs a note as they and their co-stars belt out power ballads and shoe-shufflers rooted in such provocative subject matter as homelessness, homosexuality, drug addiction and AIDS. Whereas recent adaptations of innocuous stage hits “Chicago” and “The Phantom of the Opera” boasted oodles of heart-swelling Heartland appeal, this polemical song and dance number defiantly wraps itself in its Blue State sensibilities.
The story unfolds in New York’s designer-gritty Lower East side, circa 1989-90, which Columbus and his production crew render in muted tones throughout. The main players are avant garde-ists trying to keep their creative juices flowing against a tide of negativity — poverty, intolerance, indifference and, above all, deadly disease. As Trey Parker and Matt Stone indelicately put-it while sending up “Rent” in “Team America: World Police,” everyone has AIDS. Well, almost everyone.
Mark (Anthony Rapp) is a filmmaker chronicling a year in the life of seven young bohemians who, despite relentless hardship, are intent on “measuring their lives in love.” Mark’s roommate/co-squatter Roger (Adam Pascal) is a frustrated rocker cut from the Bon Jovi mold who falls for Dawson’s smack-addicted stripper (making junkiedom look so chic). Minstrel-physicist Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin) shacks up with heart-of-gold cross-dressing street drummer Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), while Mark’s sexpot ex, performance artist Maureen (Tony winner Idina Menzel) tries to convince buttoned-up attorney Joanne she’s capable of commitment. Taye Diggs, whose memorable turn in the original stage production helped propel him to movie stardom, reprises his role as Benny, a one-time member of the group who sold out to The Man.
By Broadway musical standards the music in “Rent” can be categorized as edgy, highlighted by Rapp and Thoms’ lively performance of “Tango Maureen” and Pascal and Dawson’s weepy rendering of “I Should Tell You.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 23, 2005. Read the original PDF.