STAGE WEST: "Rent" at New Village Arts

There's nothing like a selfie among friends, as here, in "Rent."          Dupla Photography / Jason Sullivan

            Nearly 30 years after its Off Broadway premiere, Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” is enjoying an enduring lease on life.
            Just take San Diego: In 2022, the “25th Anniversary Farewell Tour” of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical visited the Civic Theatre downtown. You just had to know that this beloved show wasn’t going anywhere. More recently, San Diego State’s Musical Theatre program staged “Rent” last May. Now, in a partnership with Diversionary Theatre, New Village Arts in Carlsbad is presenting its “Rent” for a 100-seat audience, with the University Heights theater’s own 100-seat production due next spring.
            Me, I’ve seen “Rent” four or five times – the first at La Jolla Playhouse back in ’96 when the rock musical made its West Coast premiere. NVA’s “Rent” directed with spark by Kym Pappas is the first time I’ve experienced the show in more intimate confines – a plus – and the first time I’ve experienced it with recorded music instead of a live band on stage – a negative, but not as mitigating as I’d imagined.
            But here’s the irony part: New Village’s “Rent” with its exuberant, sincerely committed young cast is, to my memory, the most emotionally raw presentation of the musical I’ve seen. So why was I less affected emotionally than I’ve been in the past? It has to be because I’ve seen “Rent” enough times now that I know it well, its joys and its tragedies. I foresee them, I expect them and I’m braced for them.
            It’s come to be that way, for me, even with musicals far older than “Rent” – like “Fiddler on the Roof,” which I saw again, for the umpteenth time, this past summer at Moonlight Amphitheatre.
            This admission of stoicism is not a reflection on “Fiddler” or on NVA’s “Rent,” an in-many-ways electric production that is true to the core of Larson’s adaptation of the opera “La boheme.” Nor is it a commentary on “Rent” possibly being “dated”: though set in NYC’s East Village at the height of the AIDS crisis, “Rent” has lost none of its urgency, because it’s not about a time period or a thing, it’s about people. Friends. Lovers. People who care about each other just as we care about those who are close to us, those who reach out to us and we reach out to.
            What struck me most about seeing “Rent” again, however, was the incredibly nuanced and beautiful music and lyrics Larson created. Here’s the score that can stir your inner being, as with the tender “Without You” and the timeless “Seasons of Love,” but also entertain for laughter – “Tango Maureen,” for one, the recurring “Christmas Bells” sequences for another. I’d forgotten how rousing “What You Own” can be and how ideal “La Vie Boheme,” sung by the company, is in capturing the spirit of these interconnected human beings in their raging, difficult lives.
            That’s why I didn’t miss the live-band-onstage as I much as I thought I would. It’s the songs. Just the songs. I was reminded – as I am every time I attend a performance of “Rent” – of what we lost when Larson passed away the night before his show began previews Off Broadway.
            Much of the success of NVA’s scaled-down production goes not only to Pappas, for whom “Rent” is a personal favorite, but to choreographer Tamara Rodriguez, music director Elena Correia and scenic designer Christopher Scott Murillo, who has taken advantage of every possible space in the theater to honor a setting that is typically accomplished with towering scaffolding and more.
            There must have been some first-time “Rent” audience members at New Village Friday night, but from the general crowd reaction, I suspect they were few.
            Still, for the uninitiated: Mark Cohen (Brennen Winspear) and Roger Davis (Josh Bradford) are roommates in a flat that erstwhile friend/current landlord Benny (Juwan Stanford) is threatening to evict them from. (The show’s title song reflects their predicament.) Mark is an aspiring filmmaker who carries a movie camera around like a security blanket for his loneliness (though the likable Winspear portrays him with such good-natured awaremess that he doesn’t seem that lonely). Roger, a singer/songwriter in quest of that one great song, knows that this might be his legacy – he has been diagnosed HIV-positive.
            Roger’s circumstances aren’t changed, but his heart is, when he meets downstairs neighbor Mimi Marquez (Lena Ceja), a lightning bolt of vivacity and animation in spite of her drug addiction. This relationship is paralleled by that between gay professor Tom Collins (Van Angelo) and the charming, cross-dressing Angel (Xavier J. Bush).
            Back to Mark: He’s been dumped by performance artist/activist Maureen Johnson (Shannon McCarthy, savoring the showiest part in the musical) for an uptight attorney (Eboni Muse, right there with McCarthy in the savoring-the-part department.)
            Everyone’s destined to some extent for moments of exigence, reckonings of self and at worst loss. Larson’s sensitive score carries them through the choppy waters from which not everyone will surface intact.
            Thirty years on, the Maureen solo performance (“Over the Moon”) feels excessive and the first act of “Rent” in general way too long. There are still enough highlights of jubilant anarchy and sanguine philosophy (not to mention jaundiced fun with the holidays, Christmas most of all) that the show neither lags nor sinks inexorably into its sadness.
            Director Pappas has plainly given her cast the freedom to take their characters to the emotional edge, seen and heard by all but with Ceja (case in point the fervent “Out Tonight”) and Angelo (brokedown as brokedown can be in the aftermath of Angel’s death) in particular. Bradford’s Roger and Winspear’s Mark are right up there with the best Rogers and Marks I’ve seen with this show.
            All right. I’ve seen “Rent” yet again. So I’m done. Oh, wait a minute: Diversionary’s “Rent” will be here before I know it. (It opens next May.) The season of love stretches on and on. In “daylights, in sunsets, in midnights” and beyond.
            “Rent” runs through Dec. 24 at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad.