Snarkastic

The thing about RENT

This isn't a review. I don't imagine I'll write one. I know the ending, and most of the questions I'm mulling about the adaptation require short, declarative answers. If you want a review, there's a pretty amazing one here, of all places. It starts out like this: "RENT is the kind of thing you're supposed to write before you die, even if you don't know you're dying". Don't read it if you've never seen the show. [Sidebar: Did y'all know La Boheme was first performed in 1896? Spookay!] And I'm sorry, in advance, about the tagline at the end. It could not be helped. Cloying? Sure. So's the music. (If it makes you feel any better, though, the alternate title was "Jesus Everloving Christ, It's Just a Fucking Musical".)

So the movie's out tomorrow, and everyone I know who's not climbing the walls in delirium doesn't seem to quite know what to think yet. I'm with them.

And in my own defense, it's not because it's a show that first hit all of us at a very...malleable time in our lives (though it did) and seeing it all "commercialized", seeing it in the hands and through the lens of Chris God Damned Columbus is gonna be weird (though it is) and hearing random be-Ugg-booted shrieker-monkeys wailing its melodies on the streets for the next six months will be trying to our "jaded" innards (though it will).

I heard the music for the first time right after the show hit, and right before it hit big, when a lucky cohort scored orchestra seats while vacationing and came home besotted and bearing the soundtrack, chord book, and glossies. And we who were raised on Cats and Camelot sprawled in his bedroom on a warm evening in suburbia, listening in silence to songs unlike any we'd heard before.

Thing is, back then it was New, Different, Something Else, and so much of it was so far out of our reach of understanding. Ten years ago, to the best of my knowledge I'd never met an infected person. My brushes with drugs, alcohol, love, sex, and suicide were still ahead of me, though I didn't know it. But there was something, Something about that music that sang to everyone in the room, and with no hesitation I could tell you who was there and what they were wearing, ten years later with no hesitation.

And the groundswell begat the hype begat the fatigue. The last time a friend was taken aback at my exasperation when he came home squealing and freewheeling about how it was Just The Most Amazing Show Ever Oh My God You Just Don't Understand It's All So Spiritual, I put it to him like this: "It's like running up to a movie geek friend of yours, all breathless and sweaty, and saying, 'I just saw the most incredible film! It changed my LIFE! Maybe you've heard of it - it's called Pulp Fiction.'" That's irksome enough, but everyone I know's also got at least one late-to-the-party pal who came out of one of the matinees of the latest tour convinced, CONVINCED, that they or their bedmate (or, in one riotously funny instance, both) had the AIDS. (That last one actually happened to me, and it wasn't so much hilarious because ha-ha-LOL-AIDS-is-funny, but because it was 2003-or-4 and these kids were too stupid to get tested until they saw a fucking musical about how they could die if they didn't.)

And then came the trailers, almost before anyone knew there was a film afoot. And I was among the early vicious detractors of Columbus...until I found out Spike Lee was originally slated. I'm honestly not sure which prospect horrifies me more. In an ideal world, who would you have in charge of something that spoke to you so stridently in such a tumultuous year? Luhrman has the stage-ism, but not the realism. Cuaron, the opposite. Rob Marshall is the obvious and fantasyland choice, but he was on geisha duty. I mean, come on. They waited ten years for the timing and the funds and six-of-eight of the original cast, and...this guy? It's not that I think he'll have the cast up doing the Culkin Face Slap-'n'-Scream ™ when things take a turn for the tragic, or that AIDS will be cut entirely from the plot and we'll have eight triple threats tracigally stricken with scarlet fever like some oversexed Velveteen-Rabbit-with-fishnets roadshow, but...worst case scenario's not that far off.

So who knows what will happen? Ten years later, while the music's not as close to me, the issues are far more relevant. Ten years later, I have to use both hands to count the infected friends, though mercifully one will still suffice to number the dead. Ten years later, will a cast in their thirties, however immortally they inhabit their roles, bring the same youth, immediacy, and desperate energy they brought to the stage? Will their transcendent talent be a match for the formidable opponent of ham-lensed Columbus and Adam Pascal's caterwauling consonants? Will I even be queued up with the rest of the faithful tomorrow night?

Bet your ass I will. Because it's ten years later, and there's still no day but today. Posted by Nastinchka at November 22, 2005 09:31 PM