In prep for seeing the musical Saturday night, I read an article about the history of the play and its start in the NYC Theater Workshop community. When playwright Billy Aronson and composer Jonathan Larson collaborated on the concept of the piece, Aronson wasn't thrilled by the title, until Larson pointed out that rent also meant "torn apart."
And how apropos this meaning is for me right now. Little could I have known when I bought this ticket months ago I would be in such a torn apart situation as I am right now over several things. This thought weighed heavily on my mind as I watched the performance before me.
I made it in time and was sitting in my seat well before curtain call but the jaunty walk from the parking garage (the usual one behind city hall) across Orange Avenue and the big lawn in front of the impressive Dr. Philips Center for the Performing Arts, tuckered me out and I was slightly huffing and sweating quite a bit from the combination of my bad physical state and the hot and humid evening.
I looked around once situated and yet again I was surrounded by the usual Winter Park snob set sprinkled with the standard amount of the blue haired folks. White, rich and sadly suburban Floridians with their pressed "dress" Hawaiian shirts and white khakis, cotton/poly blend sundresses, backyard tans and, on both men and women, tightly brushed grayhairs perfectly hairsprayed down.
And yes, as always, my ears were given a gentle break form having to enduring loud applause and whoops of delight. That would only come from the disparate scattered groups of my fellow cultured fags in pockets outside of my decidedly more uppity priced seat in mid orchestra. Yup, because I treated myself to a nearly triple digit locale, I was once again among the season ticket holders who could give a rat's ass about the message of the show (in fact a couple never returned after intermission...I think they may have been offended by the idea of hippy squatters screwing rich fucks like them).
A younger couple sat to my right and they looked at first glance like my kinda folk, dressed in black, the girl looked a bit goth and the guy a bit hipster with his man bun and all. But they too, were all Easter Island faces and reactions. "What's up with that?" I thought. But then I realized that they were Millennials or maybe even older-looking Z Gens and probably native Floridians. What the fuck would they know of the characters on stage. Yes, they were their same age group, but they lived in an era of a pre-gentrified lower East Side Manhattan, suffered through harsh winters in SalArmee coats, dealt head on with AIDS having only crappy AZT to stay alive, screened landline phone calls with an answering machine and believed in a funky artists' community that created art for the sake of creating, not making a buck. "Who were these sick fucks?" they probably thought. After all, this was their parents' generation.
And in a way, I think that generation disconnect infected the performers' portrayal of their characters as well. I mean, the songs, they nailed them very well. I mean the thing is a rock opera so there's not a single spoken word unlike the film version. Every line is sung, but many "dialog" lines were sung just to classify it as opera, they could have been spoken. And maybe that would have helped since I think a few of the plot lines were not fleshed out enough to us viewers either because the sung dialog wasn't enunciated well enough, the right words were not emphasized well enough or the wrong emotional context was used. Any of those elements could fail and the message would become lost. And that happened quite a bit.
But the complete songs, especially the popular pieces, were sung with all the right notes...and passion. The scene where Angel's funeral is taking place was especially well done. Really good acting since I'm sure it was a stretch for these young performers in their twenties who I'm sure never had to experience a close friend of family member of theirs die of AIDS.
It was a long show, 'bout two and a half hours by my reckoning. And after it was all said and done, feeling a bit like some 525,600 minutes later, I made my way home white-knucling it on I-4 and thinking how I too was on the verge of not making rent, how I too was torn between living life on my bohemian terms or selling out, and how I too was losing a dear friend forever.