What: Rent
Where: McPherson Playhouse, 3 Centennial Square
When: Friday, Nov. 23, through Dec. 2
Tickets: $18.75-$54.50 through the Royal McPherson box office, by phone at 250-386-6121, or online at rmts.bc.ca
The Victoria Operatic Society has never officially tackled Rent, its only brush with the famed Broadway musical about struggling artists in 1980s-era New York City being a one-song sampling during its Broadway: Decades in Review show in 2011.
Rent will make its long-awaited Victoria debut on Friday, more than a decade after Jonathan Larson’s Tony Award-winning classic closed on Broadway.
The demand for tickets has been strong, and the Victoria Operatic Society has added a seventh performance to its run to accommodate it.
“The early box office has outsold just about every other VOS show at this point,” said Rent director Doug Crockett.
“The early sales have been phenomenal. It has already outsold Spamalot and Les Misérables, which I think were two of our biggest productions.”
The early success isn’t surprising, given the success of the original. Rent ran for 5,123 performances during its 12 years on Broadway, and has become a popular off-Broadway and touring production in the decades since.
Though several versions of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical were available for purchase, the Victoria Operatic Society chose to base its production on Larson’s original Broadway version, given the pressure riding on the production.
To date, Rent has never been performed on this scale in Victoria by this or any other company. Calgary-based Jeff Parry Productions booked performances of Rent at the Royal Theatre in 2004, but they were eventually cancelled.
Crockett never saw the original, but knew his best chance for success was to keep Larson’s version intact.
“I didn’t want to reinvent something that was a success. Since it has never been done in Victoria on this scale, we wanted to show audiences why it became a hit.”
Though aspects of the original story have become less topical, particularly the AIDS epidemic, Rent has lost little of its relevance after two decades.
The eight artists who struggle to stay alive in New York’s East Village during the late 1980s and early 1990s are not unlike today’s working poor, and the high cost of living and lack of affordable housing in the story will be familiar to many — especially in Victoria, Crockett said.
“It’s about poverty. The original story revolved around the tent city next door to this old music factory the characters are squatting in, and how one of their ex-roommates has bought the land and wants to build a high-rise with condos on top. It’s about the gentrification of New York that happened during that time.”
Rent is based on a very specific time in New York City’s past, when squatters and street artists — from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to bands associated with punk club CBGB’s — made do with what they had, and created art for art’s sake.
The characters in Rent never make it to the point where they get rich and famous, and the story is often quite solemn; half the main characters either have AIDS or are HIV-positive, and one eventually dies (the musical suffered its own real-life tragedy in 1996 when Larson died from an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm the day before the first preview performance).
Crockett felt he could offer some perspective to the eight core cast members, the oldest of whom is 34. He also lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco and spent a lot of time in New York in the years in which Rent is set.
“I knew they were going to have no reference at all to this time period. They didn’t really know what that was like. This was something I could offer them.”
Crockett also lost a lot of colleagues and friends to AIDS when he was living in Los Angeles.
“In 1996, when this first opened on Broadway, AIDS was still a death sentence. Now it’s more manageable, but it is certainly not cured. There’s enough disease and death in the world right now that people can relate to what that is like.”
Crockett and his cast — Liam McDonald (who plays Mark), Sean Baker (Roger), Alyssa Bryce (Mimi), Liam Reitsma (Benny), Bret Newton (Tom), Dan Comeau (Angel), Rae Paxton (Joanne) and Sarah Newton (Maureen) — relied on videos, photos and books for research, which led to period-perfect costumes.
A sweater modelled after the one worn by Anthony Rapp, who played Mark in the original cast, was knit by Anne Logie of James Bay’s New Horizons Senior Community Centre — a key piece of Rent’s original wardrobe, as it turns out.
That attention to detail by costume designer Jeff Mousseau and his team was an important step for this production if it was going to appeal to perhaps the most demanding audience of all, Crockett said.
“There are Rent-heads out there — that’s what they call the diehards. They are going to come knowing every word and every movement of that play, so we certainly want to make them happy.”
