KEEPING IT REAL
Spike Lee wanted Timberlake and Aguilera, but one of the most commercial directors in the biz, Chris Columbus, cast Rent, the movie, with the same people who populated the play in its off-Broadway debut, writes Richard Ouzounian NEW YORK
osario Dawson slinks
down a flight of stairs
in a subterranean
East Village dive called The Cat Scratch Club. Her hips swivel with the promise of unlimited good times, but the druggy fog behind her eyes hints at how much it’s going to cost. She holds out her arms, inviting the crowd of leering men to join her in a place “ where all the scars from the nevers and maybes die.”
Rent has finally made it to the silver screen. But for the hit musical that took the basic plot of La Bohème, added a driving rock score and moved it to Manhattan’s Alphabet City, it’s been a long time coming. How long?
“ 525,600 minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?” ask the cast in the song “ Seasons of Love.” Multiply that by 10 and you’d come pretty close.
At long last, as tourists line up outside the plush Ritz Carlton Hotel to see the Statue of Liberty, the press are converging inside on the creative team of Rent, the movie.
“ It’s been an incredible journey,” says Julie Larson. She’s the sister of Jonathan Larson, who wrote the book, music and lyrics of Rent.
She’s speaking for her brother, because he died before his show could be turned into a film. In fact, he died before he ever saw it played in its final form.
That’s one of the major items that has helped turn a successful show into a cult, a myth, a touchstone
Rfor a generation of young theatregoers. Not among their number, at first, was Rosario Dawson. “ I was a teenager when it first came out and I heard all the buzz. But I thought, ‘ Why do I have to see this? I’ve been living it,’ ” she says now.
“ I grew up in a squat on the Lower East Side with no running water or electricity. We had an extension cord that went from the building across the courtyard for the one refrigerator that we had for the entire building.” But Dawson came around. She’s joined a cast remarkable not for its big names, but for the fact that six of the eight leading roles are being played by the actors who created the parts nearly a decade earlier.
Rent’s arrival on the big screen, then, is no less emotional for the actors than for the show’s horde of ardent fans.
Cast member Anthony Rapp, who plays the Larson surrogate, Mark, recalls that “Jonathan used to come up to people and introduce himself as the future of the American musical theatre.”
It took a great deal of determination to feel that way because Larson went through nearly a decade after graduating from college before things started to move at all for him. There was the usual mix of workshops, small productions and grants that struggling authors cling to while slogging away at their day jobs.
Larson earned his living as a waiter at a stylized little diner called Moondance at the base of Sixth Ave. while subsisting on a diet of shredded wheat and pasta in an apartment where the bathtub was in the kitchen. The idea for Rent started percolating in 1989, which is the reason director Chris Columbus decided to set the film then, rather than in 1996, when it opened.
Originally conceived as a yuppie take on La Bohème, Larson decided to move the show way down the economic scale and write about the addicts, hustlers, transvestites and loners who lived in that chunk of the Lower East Side where streets with names like Avenue A had led to the designation “ Alphabet City.”
His Mimi didn’t have tuberculosis, as per Puccini, but AIDS. And her recovering addict lover Roger (instead of Rudolfo) is HIV-positive, as well. Larson added same- sex couples of both genders and set it to a sound that married genuine rock with the musical theatre tradition.
Everyone who heard it in progress thought it had promise, but it still took Larson five years to get a showcase at the N. Y. Theater Workshop.
That mounting attracted sufficient buzz to generate a full production, slated to start previews on January 25, 1996. The night before, there was a dress rehearsal that went like a dream.
“ We really knew we had something,” recalls Idina Menzel, who plays the bisexual performance artist Maureen, “ but we didn’t quite know just how big it was.” Word had spread uptown and in the audience that evening was a reporter from the New York Times who wanted to speak to Larson.
Taye Diggs, who plays the upwardly mobile Benny, can still remember that night.
“ Jonathan was crowded around by scores of people, all of them wanting a piece of him. You had a sense in the air of something happening. I wanted to talk to him, but as I started over, the guy from the Times got to him first. I said to myself, ‘ That’s okay, I’ll do it tomorrow.’ ” But he never did. Larson had been feeling poorly for a few weeks and had paid visits to several emergency rooms.
In the early hours of the morning after that triumphant rehearsal, Larson went home, made himself a cup of tea and collapsed on the floor of his apartment. He died of an aortic aneurysm at age 35.
“ The next day, they phoned us and asked us to all come down to the theatre . . .” Diggs starts, but he can’t continue. Even after all this time, the memory hurts too much.
Jesse L. Martin played the burly, lovable Collins who winds up in a doomed love affair with the transvestite Angel. Back then he was an unknown actor; now everybody recognizes Det. Ed Green from Law & Order. He tries to explain what the next few months were like.
“ We were dealing with a whole lot of heaven and a whole lot of hell.
“ After Jonathan’s death, it became the most important thing in the world to see that what he wrote got out to the people.” By the time the show officially opened to the public on Feb. 13, it was already the media event of the winter. The rave reviews made sure that an immediate transfer to Broadway was in order. The date was set for April 29; before it could happen, the Pulitzer Prize committee posthumously gave the award for drama to Jonathan Larson. Rentwas everywhere that year. It won most of the major Tony Awards, generated an amazing advance sale and created a crowd of fanatical fans called Rentheads who lined up for rush seats to every performance. One of them was Tracie Thomas. She’s now one of the new cast members, playing the lesbian lawyer Joanne, but back then she was just a fan.
“ From the moment I saw the original cast, it became my mission in life to be a part of Rent in any way, whether it was on tour or playing the 14th homeless woman in the ensemble on Broadway, I didn’t care.”
Eventually even Rosario Dawson was won over. “ When I finally saw Rent, I was grateful, because it gave me the articulation to look back on my life and where it could have gone. I love Mimi, but I’m glad I’m not Mimi.” Rent spawned numerous successful satellite productions while continuing to sell out on Broadway and obviously a property this hot had to make its way to Hollywood, but there were many problems. The first was the Larson family. As administrators of Jonathan’s estate, they were hesitant about what might happen to his work in being translated to the screen.
“ It was a big discussion among our family whether we would allow the whole idea of a movie to be made,” admits Julie Larson.
“ We realized that a lot more people would be able to hear Jonathan’s music. We also finally realized what would have kept us from going ahead would have been fear. And so much of what Rent is about is not choosing fear.” Once they agreed there was still the question of who would direct and who would star.
Spike Lee was initially tapped to direct. He interviewed the original cast but then announced he wasn’t going to use them, preferring instead to sign the likes of Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.
Soon, Lee was gone and the project was put into turnaround. Then, a surprising fan came to its rescue.
Chris Columbus is best known as the director of family- friendly flicks like Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter films, but he had been a Renthead from the start.
“ I’ve lived in Manhattan for 17 years. I’ve lived in a loft. I knew these people and I loved the show.”
Like Lee, he wanted to bring the original cast together because “ these people had lived through Jonathan’s death and were connected in a very strong way.” But once burned, twice shy. “ Tell Chris Columbus he doesn’t have to waste my time in a f-king pity meeting,” is how Menzel recalls her initial reaction to what she saw as a repeat of Lee’s condescension. Columbus prevailed. Only two original cast members are not in the movie: Daphne Rubin- Vega, because she was pregnant, and Fredi Walker because, in her opinion, she is now too old for the role. So Rentis finally a film. But will it still work for audiences nearly 10 years after its first production? Columbus feels it needs to because “ we as a country have taken a huge step backwards since the play was written. We’ve become more isolated, more defensive and we need to shake people up a little bit.” Which is precisely what Jonathan Larson wanted to do all along.