Opera Australia’s Production of RENT Is Grungy, Passionate & Powerful

The sails of the Opera House were nearly blown off on the opening night of RENT last week by the supportive hoots, whistles, shouts and cheers of the largely youthful audience.

Admittedly, there would have been many friends and relatives of the 18 cast members and the crew in the capacity seating, but Jonathan Larson has to take the credit for writing a thrilling musical (with Billy Aronson) that appeals to the hearts and souls of youth and draws them to the theatre.

Taking its inspiration from Puccini’s romantic 1896 opera La Bohème, RENT tells the story of a group of young bohemians living in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side of New York, under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic.

There’s Mark (Henry Rollo), a documentary filmmaker who begins recording his milieu, and the musician Roger (Harry Targett), who has been diagnosed with HIV.

Their friend Angel (Jesse Dutlow) is a drag artist who lives with HIV, and the eponymous Mimi (Kristin Paulse) is a dancer who does not survive life on the streets.

Others in the group are Collins (Googoorewon Knox), a considerate friend, Maureen (Calista Nelmes), Mark’s ex-girlfriend, and her new partner Joanne (Imani Williams), a lawyer.

Roger (Harry Targett as Rodolfo from La Bohème) and Mimi sing a moving duet which parallels the story of Puccini’s opera, except Roger is a recovering addict and Mimi has just dropped her stash (where the original Mimi dropped her key).

Director Shaun Rennie and choreographer Luca Dinardo move this large ensemble around the cluttered stage with great ease, but for the vertical ladders of this rooftop setting that occasionally seemed to impede the steps of this fabulous all-singing, all-dancing cast.

That said, Dann Barber’s rooftop set provides a suitably grungy visual backdrop for the millennial bohos living under the AIDS scare.

Personally, I would have liked Paul Jackson’s lighting design to have lit up the stage a little more to capture facial expressions, but grunge by definition is, well, grungy.

While all 18 cast members are terrific, each one of them exuding high voltage energy and enthusiasm, especially notable are Googoorewon Knox for his powerful vocals and emotional phrasing, and Calista Nelmes in her breath-taking rendition of Over the Moon, when she combined vocal power, humour and physical agility to produce a tour de force performance (as a cow).

Calista’s bovine costume was terrific, too, thanks to costume designer Ella Butler, who also captured the grunge element of the group in the muted colours of their costumes.

With the threat of AIDS hanging over them, someone was inevitably going to succumb — and it was the appropriately named Angel, who dies during the course of the play and rises heavenwards on silver wings in a transcendental moment that pays homage to the 1991 play by Tony Kushner, Angels in America.

Jonathan Larson introduced new subjects like HIV/AIDS, poverty, homelessness, and sexual identity to the stage in his attempt to make theatre more relevant to contemporary audiences. This goes partway to explain the musical’s huge popularity with young people, as was evident at the Joan Sutherland Theatre last week.

In a tribute to the first Australian production in 1998, the original cast members, including Christine Anu (Mimi) and Rodger Corser (Roger), were called on stage at the finale to join the cast in singing what is probably the best-known number in the show, Seasons of Love (the 525,600 minutes, “How do you measure a life?” song).

This is a fantastic show, with a very moving story, danced with great intensity, sung with heartfelt passion, and definitely not to be missed!

A suggestion for Opera Australia: What about introducing subtitles for musicals, so the oldies in the audience can appreciate the nuances of the “libretto”?