New "Season of Love" at New Rep

While watching New Rep’s RENT, the audience forgets that they have already seen the movie, that they know the plot-line and the characters’ fates even before Mark (John Ambrosino) rolls his video camera.  Watching the cast, you can’t help but be re-absorbed into the lives of the characters presented.

Robert St. Laurence performs Roger brilliantly.  He walks through each scene stricken with sadness, his face gaunt and his eyes rimmed in red.  Even while singing the flirtatious duet “Light My Candle” with the coy exotic dancer Mimi (Eve Kagan), he manages to look exhausted.  He sings “One Song Glory” proudly, but with a note of desolation in his voice that makes the song unforgettable.

Nick Sulfaro, who is endearing and funny as Angel as he sings about getting paid to kill a yapping dog in “Today 4 U,” has an instant chemistry with everyone else on stage.  Aimee Doherty is equally quirky as Maureen with her avant garde protest and exasperated outburst that “There will always be a woman in rubber flirting with me!”

The scenery of the play is not so much bounded, as sketched.  The framework for an apartment, and performance space, and doorstep, and cafe are all there, but it takes the actors to bring life to this framework.  Their vitality turns even a wood-burning stove and a fire-escape into a home.  From the multi-colored flyers lining the walls of the theater space to the industrial scaffolding framing Roger and Mark’s warehouse apartment, the stage has a 3-dimensionality that emphasizes the complexities of the characters' lives.  As the cast takes the stage for an AIDS support meeting, Roger is off-center in the shadows, quietly strumming on his guitar, reinforcing his solitude.  The complexity is also seen as members of the ensemble periodically watch from the second story, revealing that the story is bigger than the lives of this group of friends, that there are lives going on outside of the performance.  

Several choruses repeat the line: “There’s only us/ there’s only this/ forget regret, or life is yours to miss.” RENT is, at its heart, a celebration of life.  As the homeless warm their freezing hands over the fire or the artists “moo” along with Maureen, the audience is struck by their togetherness, and that is the most memorable part of the performance.  

-- Victoria Petrosino