TT: The good old bad old days

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on the new off-Broadway production of Rent. Here’s an excerpt.
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Fifteen years ago, Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was the hippest musical on Broadway–which wasn’t saying much. Virtually all of the musicals that opened there in the ’90s were totally forgettable and are deservedly forgotten. “Rent,” on the other hand, is well remembered, partly because it stayed open until 2008 and partly because it was the most influential show of the post-Sondheim era, a rock musical that contrived to put AIDS, drug addiction, drag queenery and homo- and bisexuality onstage without simultaneously putting off the tourist trade. Nor does its 5,123-performance Broadway run appear to have exhausted the marketability of “Rent.” A new Off-Broadway production has just opened at New World Stages, the complex to which “Avenue Q” transferred two years ago after its own long run on Broadway.
Despite the fact that Michael Greif, the show’s first director, has restaged it, this “Rent” is not a remounting but a true revival, featuring an all-new cast and freshly designed sets by Mark Wendland whose metal scaffolding echoes the fire-escape motif of Oliver Smith’s now-legendary décor for “West Side Story.” At the same time, no attempt has been made to update the show, and its overall effect is essentially the same. All that’s changed is the people in the audience: They’re still young, but precisely because they’re so youthful, Mr. Larson’s affectionate portrait of bohemian New York in the early ’90s clearly comes across to them not as an exercise in nostalgia for the good old bad old days but as a theme-park recreation of a world they never knew. They might as well be watching “Woodstock”–or “West Side Story,” for that matter.
And what of the show itself? If you were following the theater scene in 1996, you’ll remember the wild hoopla that greeted the opening of “Rent,” which snagged the best-musical Tony and even won a Pulitzer Prize. No doubt the fact that Mr. Larson died the day after the dress rehearsal for the original Off-Broadway production had something to do with the show’s enthusiastic reception, but to revisit “Rent” a decade and a half after the fact is to suspect that its drag-queens-are-people-too subject matter was the real source of its popularity. Viewed in the harsh light of hindsight, “Rent” is by turns chirpy and sentimental…
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Read the whole thing here.