The Director Sector

I saw RENT at The Fox in Atlanta last night.  It was sorta-kinda-maybe-not what I expected.  I was expecting a little more pizzazz, a little less cheese, and a lot stronger vocals.

Plot. Most of you know the plot, but for those who don’t, I’ll rehash it real quick: Mark is the narrator and he is filming a documentary.  Roger’s ex killed herself when she and Roger got AIDS, and now Roger’s afraid to leave his apartment.  Benny married the daughter of the owner of the building and tries to blackmail his former roommates Mark and Roger into stopping Maureen’s protest.  Maureen is a rights activist/protestor who used to date Mark, but she dumped him for a lawyer named Joanne.  Joanne is an uptight, jealous, protective woman who loves Maureen.  Collins is a computer anarchist who meets Angel, a transvestite, and they fall in love.  Both Collins and Angel have AIDS.  Meanwhile, Roger meets a stripper/heroine addict named Mimi and they fall in love.  At some point, Angel dies, the group of friends drift apart.  It’s a good story based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme.

Lights. The lights, to be blunt, were crap.  The show was completely back-lit and side-lit, with no front lights.  Basically, that meant that when an actor faced downstage, half of him was in the shadow and the other half was in the light.  Actors who face the wrong direction are completely hidden in shadow.  On top of that, there were no light cues or anything that identified who was singing at any given moment, which can be a problem when you’ve got 20 people on stage and only one person is singing a solo line, but they’re all moving around and dancing.  Who’s singing?  Who knows?!  There were also two points in the show where a large spotlight was shone straight out into the audience, nearly blinding us.  The second of these was when Maureen came out onto the stage.  I couldn’t see anything for the first half of “Over the Moon” because I had been blinded.

Acting. The acting was fine.  RENT is largely a musical for singers, as opposed to a musical for actors.  In fact, this is highly apparent when you look at the playbill for the show.  Half the cast were American Idol contestants.  The guy who played Roger was the South African Idol winner a couple of years ago.  None of them were particularly good dancers or actors, but they weren’t particularly bad either.  The three actors that stuck out the most to me as GOOD actors were the girl who played Maureen (her first gig out of college!), the guy who played Mark (also a recent grad, if I recall correctly), and Benny.  I really believed they were Mark, Maureen and Benny.  The rest of them could’ve been anyone.

Vocals. Because the cast was largely comprised of singers from American Idol, the vocals were pretty good.  The first half of the show had problems where I couldn’t understand or hear half of what they were saying, but when it cleared up in th second act, I concluded that it was the venue’s sound system that had FUBAR’d.  The guy who played Roger never actually hit his opening notes, he’d sing up to them, which was slightly annoying.  The rest of the cast did a fine job.

Costumes. The costumes were pretty good with the exception of Collins and Joanne.  I didn’t buy for a minute that either one of them were who they were supposed to be.  Collins looked like a gangster from the street, not a computer-literate hacker (no offense to any gangster-hackers out there).  Joanne looked like Queen Latifah from Barbershop, not a rich lawyer.  Other than that, good stuff.  Mark and Maureen especially looked good, and Angel’s costumes were typical tranvestite stuff.  Good deal.

Music. The music was the strongest part of the show.  Jonathan Larson, the composer and writer of RENT, did a fantastic job with the music.  The band was pretty good and unobtrusive, given that they were actually on stage with the actors.

Now I’m going to address some directing decisions that I didn’t like, that I feel could’ve been done better.

Directing. First of all, the casting of a few characters was off.  Collins and Joanne didn’t look or act like who they were supposed to be.  There was an ensemble guy who stood out like nobody’s business.  Ensemble cast members aren’t supposed to stick out — they blend in as extras and swing parts.  Every time this one guy came out, I’d think “That’s Gordon”.  None of the other ensemble stuck out in that way to me.

Second, the choreography was decent across the board, but there were some stylized things that I didn’t like.  Collins and Roger especially did some weird crazy hand waving gestures that were supposed to emphasize what they were saying, but really came across as cheesy attempts to explain stuff that should already be obvious.  In addition, there were two songs in particular where the choreography just didn’t work.  In “What You Own”, Roger and Mark are in two separate places: Santa Fe and New York, respectively.  However, on stage, it seemed as if they were in the same room.  They kept walking past each other, yet not acknowledging each other.  The ignoring each other might work if it were obvious that they weren’t looking at each other, but it really truly looked like they were staring at each other the whole time.  If I were to do it differently, I would have put Roger up on the balcony in the back and kept Mark in the studio apartment, and at the end of the song, have them come back together.

On that some line of thought, there were several moments in the play where certain actors were in their own little worlds having conversations that nobody else should see.  For example, in “I Should Tell You”, Roger and Mimi have a special moment where they both realize the other has AIDS and that there’s nothing to be afraid of.  This song should take place in a more private place, like outside or in a hallway or something.  Instead, it takes place down-center in front of the table that was being used for La Vie Boheme.  The rest of the cast is cooped up on one side of the table, and they’re all staring at Roger and Mimi.  I don’t think the rest of the cast should have been there at all.  There are ways of keeping them close by for the next number without having them staring into what is obviously an intimate and private moment.  Face them upstage, freeze them in the last known position, move them just offstage, whatever — just get them out of our faces.

In the opening number “RENT”, there’s the line where Collins says,

“Welcome back to town,
Oh I should lie down,
Everything’s turning brown, and
Oh, I feel sick!”

Roger and Mark are down-center, and they’re looking straight at Collins who is stage-left on the ground bleeding.  Then as soon as Collins says “I feel sick” the lights drop on him, Roger and Mark face the audience and say:

“Where is he?”

C’mon.  They don’t know where he is!  Why were they just looking at him?

When you want to establish that characters are in different places, you have to have them a) in a physically different spot, b) in different lighting conditions and c) NOT LOOKING AT THE OTHER CHARACTERS THAT AREN’T THERE!  Talk about breaking my suspension of disbelief.

Finally, the biggest problem seemed to be lack of chemistry.  I didn’t really think that any of those characters seemed to care for any of the others except for Maureen and Joanne.  Even Collins felt kind of disconnected from everything.  Maybe they were just tired, I don’t know.

There were a handful of other complaints that I have, but I can’t remember them at the moment, as my stomach is growling.  I’ll conclude this by saying that I’m rather disappointed in this Equity tour.  I skipped the last tour that came through because it was a non-Equity performance from a company that had gotten pretty consistently bad reviews over the past few years.  I didn’t want my first viewing of RENT (live) be a bad one.  Guess I messed up on that one.