RENT DIVERSIONARY THEATRE
Diversionary has made a delightful reimagining of a beloved musical, mixing in filmic and interactive elements to create a wonderful, immersive, and unique night of theatre.
WOWWW this show was crazy good. No, I really liked it. Like, really, really liked it. I was awash with queer pride the whole way through, and was basking in the success of a story as fervently lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender as this.
It would be one thing for this production to maintain all of the queer representation in the original 1998 script of RENT, but not only does it boost the presence of queer identities in the show, it does so with a set of phenomenal actors who make the text shine with their performances.
The cast of RENT Photo Credit: Xing Photo Studio
Set in the mid ‘90s in the Mecca for starving artists: New York City’s East Village, RENT chronicles the experiences of a batch of passionate but destitute (by choice or otherwise) Bohemians living through the end of the world. While struggling through the AIDS crisis and facing a government indifferent to and complicit in their suffering, the Bohemians fight on to love, discover, and create. Mark the aspiring filmmaker (Jonathan Sangster), Roger the suffering musician (Gio Coppola), Mimi the young dancer (Maya Sofia), Tom Collins the scholar and technician (Andre Heimos), Angel the drummer and drag queen (Allen Lucky Weaver), Maureen the performance artist (Michael Amira Temple) and her girlfriend Joanne the lawyer (Nio Russell) attempt to stay alive while striving to make visionary art and trying desperately not to pay their rent.
Diversionary’s performance centers Mark’s filmmaking specifically by paving the back wall of the stage with screens onto which live-captured footage is projected. This mixed-media approach is an interesting take on the material of RENT, and it is certainly a stylization that gives more gravitas to the performance. However, I feel that the addition of screens and video capture to an otherwise live performance is contradictory to the themes of RENT, as the intention is to feel the alive and raw struggle of characters that embody real, complicated, messy people. The work of a camera is to present a more perfected lens into a person, to control the audience’s eye to look exactly where is desired, providing a veneer over the messiness of RENT’s cast. Though the screens make for some fascinating and entertaining sections, their inclusion separates the cast from the audience in a way that is not desirable for RENT, especially for the numbers that take place mostly or entirely on screen.
On the other hand, Diversionary’s performance implements a change to the conventional structure of RENT that boosts its liveness, realness, and rawness tenfold. The opening numbers of Act 2 take place downstairs from the theatre in Diversionary’s bar, where the characters enact Maureen’s performance art and the Bohemian’s incendiary number “La Vie Boheme” in a fancy diner as immersive theatre. The choice is phenomenal, and it has the opposite effect of hiding the cast behind a screen; the characters are incredibly alive when they are singing and dancing five feet in front of you, and you are made to feel an active participant in the powerful youth movement spitting at the feet and face of authority.
In addition to the excellent way co-directors Sherri Eden Barber and Coleman Ray Clark chose to stage the piece, the performances are also top-notch. Gio Coppola as Roger and Allen Lucky Weaver as Angel stood out to me most. Coppola infuses tenderness into the brooding Roger, and I was moved immensely watching him balance his fiery love for Mimi with his desire not to fall back down a path of addiction. Weaver played a wonderful and energized Angel with all the weirdness and passion becoming of the character. It also bears mentioning that the ensemble (Faith Carrion & Adelaida Martinez) was fantastic—the show conventionally has a moderately-sized ensemble, but Diversionary makes it through with only two, with no detriment to the storytelling. Both members of the ensemble make equally impassioned young revolutionaries as they do overbearing parents and greedy corporate vampires wanting to suck the life out of young art (or so the young artists perceive it). They take to their numerous quick changes excellently and make up the backbone of the show.
It goes without saying that it is wonderful to have a loud and fervently queer show, but one would be foolish to expect anything less from Diversionary. The queer representation is even more amped up when in these directors’ and this theatre’s hands, and it is a sight to behold. A beautiful production, a flamboyantly brilliant iteration on one of the great queer ancestor shows.
If you want to see fantastic acting, singing, direction, and a band of misfits struggling to make great art in a hostile and homophobic capitalist society, this is the show for you.
