“Rent” comes to town next week for a six-day run, the second iconic Broadway musical coming to the Blaisdell this season after “Phantom of the Opera” had a thrilling four-week stand earlier this year.
Though their sounds and visuals are nothing alike, the two shows have in common that they are period pieces of sorts with century-old source material — “Rent” is based on the Giacomo Puccini opera “La Boheme” — that are carried by timeless themes.
SET IN New York City’s East Village, “Rent” has the 1990s AIDS epidemic as part of its backdrop, but at its heart is a story that anyone can relate to.
“I always say it’s a play about love and family,” director Evan Ensign said in a recent phone call from New York. “It may be a non-traditional family, but … every family is non-traditional. If we go out and we pick a wife, we’re not looking at our blood relatives, we’re creating a whole new family. So that’s non-traditional and then becomes traditional. But ultimately I think it’s a play about finding love, fighting for love.”
Ensign credits those universal themes for the play retaining its relevance more than 20 years after its Broadway debut.
“It speaks to anybody,” he said. “Teenagers and people in their 20s especially are … we’re all looking for how we fit in the world and who our family’s gonna be and who our core group is. That’s universal and that still speaks, so I think the play speaks to things like people trying to figure out how they fit in.”
One of the challenges Ensign says his creative team did face was getting his very young cast to understand the urgency of what HIV- positive and AIDS-afflicted patients faced in that era, given how it has become more common for people who acquire the disease to manage it and survive.
“I think the thing I most worry about,” Ensign said, “is if the cast gets that, and then hoping that an audience of today will understand that time period and that pressure.”
He and his team showed the performers documentaries on what AIDS was like at its terrifying, deathly peak, but also just told them directly what it was like to live through the epidemic and answered their questions.
In the end, Ensign said, “we really just focus on the storytelling, and hopefully through the storytelling we’re able to give enough importance to those issues that the mortality becomes clear to the audience.”
“RENT,” PERHAPS more than any major musical, is inextricably linked to its backstory.
Jonathan Larson spent years creating the show but died at age 35 of an aortic aneurysm — on the day “Rent” was scheduled to take the stage for its first off-Broadway preview.
Larson never got to experience its emergence as a phenomenon, it being lauded as the definitive rock opera of the ‘90s or the many awards lavished upon it.
The play won the Tony and Drama Desk awards for best musical and also netted a Pulitzer Prize for drama.
And though it closed on Broadway in 2008 after 12 years and more than 5,000 performances — 11th most in the history of the Great White Way — its legacy lives on in the practices carried on by New York’s theater scene.
Larson wanted his musical to be seen by people like him, not just the wealthy, so “Rent” introduced “rush” seating — good but cheap seats available for sale a couple of hours before each performance — and the ticket lottery. Both practices are now used by many productions even more than 20 years later, Ensign said.
The creators and stars of Broadway’s current sensation — Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” — have gone out of their way to credit “Rent” for inspiring them.
“I heard this really great quote not too long ago,” “Hamilton” star Leslie Odom Jr. told Playbill in 2015, on the eve of his hit show’s debut, “that said, ‘An artist spends their entire life trying to get back to the place where their heart was first opened up,’ and ‘Rent’ was certainly that for me as a 12- or 13-year-old kid. It opened up my heart and my senses.”
Taking over the helm of a show that means so much to so many could come with pressure, but Ensign looks at it differently.
“I don’t think of it as pressure,” he said. “I think of it as an act of joy.”
Ensign’s version doesn’t veer far from Michael Greif’s original direction. His main job has been helping the cast see the heart of the show, so they can convey that to audiences.
Zare Anguay, who plays Life Support group leader Paul in the touring production, speaking from the company’s tour bus as it made its way to Connecticut, said that message was passed along well. Ensign spoke to the cast as a group and to its members individually.
“It just opened up,” said Anguay, one of two actors from Hawaii in the touring cast.
“The show means so much to a lot of people. It’s very special. It’s a very deep-rooted modern-day musical and I think it still speaks well to the generations.
Like Anguay, Joshua Tavares, the other local cast member coming home with “Rent,” had never seen the stage production before taking a role.
“I love the show,” Tavares said. “Obviously it grows when you study it and get to be in it. … I think the reason I was drawn to it, and the reason it resonates with people still and why it’s still an important story for people to see is because at the core of the story it’s about acceptance, it’s about love.”
“RENT”
20th Anniversary Tour
>> Where: Neal S. Blaisdell Concert Hall
>> When: 2 p.m. Tuesday, 7:30 p.m. Dec. 26, 2 and 8 p.m. Dec. 27-28, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Dec. 29
>> Cost: $50-$80
>> Info: 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com
