Bad Fan!

I finally saw Rent.

Yeah, yeah, I should have seen it years ago on stage, but years ago I couldn’t afford the tickets and was snippy about the pop influenced songs used in it. Which is odd because I'm a big fan of the music from Hair and Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat and they very influenced by the pop/rock style and really Joseph sampled from just about every genre it could get its little hands on (I think Andrew Loyd Weber is the devil) and I have never held that against it. The rock influenced soundtrack or ALW. To understand the depth of my ALW snobbery I had serious second thoughts about a friend I gad just met because the were a big fan of Starlight Express and considered it "quality theatre", two words I had never heard used to describe SLE...I should have seen that as a red flag friendshipwise.

I ordered Rent up from Netflix and I saw it cold, no Google research no forum sifting no nothing so I was very under the impression that it actually came out around 1989 - like the time stamp they provided at the beginning of the movie – I even called a friend at home from school and asked why those who obnoxiously sang in the hallways insisted on singing selections from Into The Woods when they could have been obnoxiously singing selections from Rent?

We fancied ourselves quite bohemian at the time and Rent would have fed our little starving artist fantasies to a T. It made me a little concerned about the state of our hipness. True, way down in San Marcos, Tx we wouldn’t have been able to go see it ourselves, but we would have known at least the songs. We seemed pretty hep at the time! But then of course, we played the soundtrack from The Little Mermaid at our yearly departmental dance and did so with a straight face… We staged John Guare shows and they were contemporary – so even if we couldn’t actually afford the licensing to stage Rent , someone would have known about it. I was really worried about us, I have kept myself warm at night thinking about how cool we, not I, I was never cool, had been. It was making me doubt what I thought I knew. Were we really theatre nerds? was the Little Mermaid thing a dark sign of dorkiness?

The songs rock in a very not your fathers' musical way. There are electric guitars! drums! amps! For Gawd sakes. And it’s “all sung” there is no book to speak of; very little dialogue to tell you what is going on between numbers. I don’t love this; it makes it kind of like watching a very, very, very long music video. The time frame it covers was also confusing, I couldn’t tell how much time was supposed to be passing or not passing and that was a little confusing. I am not cool enough for this show.

I did love the songs though. How times change. I was taken with enough of them that I went out and picked up the Best of Rent compilation. It isn’t all the songs, just the good ones. The actual sound track has like 27 numbers and costs a fortune even used. I didn’t love all the songs so it was a good middle ground. What I would still like to read would be a recap of what was going on as they were singing, I want a plot synopsis that isn’t “It’s supposed to be La Bohem”, because no, I never saw that either. I suck.

I did a little looking around and the reason the obnoxious hallway singers weren’t singing the songs in the early 90s, was because the show didn’t even hit the stage until 1996. By that time I wasn’t feeling the bohemian thing. It would have annoyed me that they were all living the dream but not having to live the dream while living with their parents or feeling pressured to get real jobs . They weren't fancy "bohemians" they were generic slackers with AZT and performance art