THEATRE REVIEW: RENT 15 Jan'10 Rating: 4 out of 5

Rent has lost some of its edge

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
15 Jan'10

TORONTO - Anyone who's ever been lucky enough to compare the vistas afforded by the Laurentian Mountains to those offered by the Rocky Mountains can tell you that time and erosion can be a mixed blessing.

For even while the older, more eroded Laurentians -- trimmed and rounded as they are to a more human level by time and its travails -- offer a more human perspective, in the process they've lost the awe-inspiring, larger-than-life majesty of the upstart Rockies, wrenched more recently from the bedrock.

In theatre, it seems, things erode more quickly with works taking on new shapes in mere months, years or decades instead of the millennia required to turn a majestic mountain into a picturesque hill.

Which leads us, a little sadly, to Rent, the monumental musical that burst onto the scene back in 1996, just as the last century was winding down and taking a millennium with it.

Written by the late Jonathan Larson (who collected a passel of posthumous but richly deserved awards for his work) and inspired by the enduring romance of Puccini's La Boheme, it tells the story of a group of young would-be artists, living from hand to mouth on the very edges of what passes for civilized New York as the 20th century draws to a close and homelessness, avarice and HIV threaten all that is familiar to them.

Filled with youth, vitality and anger, not to mention an entire rainbow of sexual tastes, Rent seemed to speak to the hearts of a new generation of theatre fans who gleefully embraced its rock 'n' roll credo of "No day but today" with a passion, both in its New York production and its subsequent Toronto staging.

And now it's back in what amounts to a valedictory tour, a tour that, among other things, reunites two of the original cast members -- Adam Pascal as rocker Roger Davis and Anthony Rapp as narrator/filmmaker Mark Cohen.

Rent opened a limited run at the Canon Theatre Wednesday night as part of the ongoing Mirvish season.

And while the 14 years that have passed since they first tackled the roles sit pretty lightly on the two leads, all things considered, the production itself, still under the stewardship of director Michael Greif, has been ground down to a point where it has lost some of its majestic, even thrilling edge and affords a more scenic tour from the middle-class middle of the road.

Despite the life and death milieu in which he has set them, it's almost as if Larson's latter-day Bohemians have given up any notion of making art or changing the world and are now content to work on audition pieces that will hopefully earn them a slot on American Idol.

So, while the majority of the singing passes muster (although Pascal seemed to struggle vocally on opening night) what's missing is the passion that used to crackle through Rent like an open flame.

Pascal's Roger and his Mimi (Lexi Lawson) do an adequate job on the hormonal stuff, but fall more than a trifle short on the vulnerability front, while Nicolette Hart's Maureen and Merle Dandridge's Joanne spend a lot of time making strange.

But where the passion really comes up short is in the love story between Michael McElroy's Tom Collins and Justin Johnston's Angel. Whether through ineptness or a misdirected concern for how it might play in the provinces, they've been allowed (encouraged?) to transform the love story that was the very real heart of Rent into a buddies-with-benefits kind of thing that fails to touch the heart the way it should.

In the process, they've robbed this monumental show of several of its untamed emotional peaks and substituted a gently rolling landscape in its place.

It's still an impressive view, mind you, but unless you were lucky enough to catch it in an earlier incarnation, you'll have to use your imagination to have any idea of the heights to which it used to soar.