BrooklynRider
November 4th, 2005, 11:41 AM
Howdy Folks! I volunteer with a wonderful organization called Friends In Deed, which provides emotional and spiritual help to people living with life-threatening illnesses, their caregivers, and people dealing with grief and bereavement. For those who saw the play "RENT" the support groups portrayed were based on Friends In Deed, where RENT's creator Jonathon Larson spent considerable time as he developed his masterpiece. Please see the information below regarding a Rent movie premiere fundraiser that will include a Question and Answer period with cast members.
www.friendsindeed.org
Anthony Rapp and Brian J. Heck
Symphony Space and Friends In Deed
cordially invite you to a special screening
of Revolution Studio's and Columbia Pictures' production
of Jonathan Larson's
Directed by Chris Columbus
Followed by a Q&A with cast members
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
7:00 PM
PETER NORTON SYMPHONY SPACE
2537 Broadway at 95th Street
New York City
1,2,3 trains to 96th Street
Tickets
$150: Front Center Orchestra
Includes post-screening reception with cast members
($115 tax-deductible)
$75: Orchestra
($65 tax-deductible)
$50: Balcony
($40 tax-deductible)
$20: Lottery Rush
First 2 rows of Orchestra
2 hours before curtain; 2 per person; Cash only
($10 tax-deductible)
ORDER TICKETS ONLINE
or
call 212-864-5400
PROCEEDS TO BENEFIT FRIENDS IN DEED
Friends In Deed, Inc. 594 Broadway, Suite 706, New York, NY 10012 Ph# 212.925.2009 Fax# 212.925.2688
TLOZ Link5
November 18th, 2005, 04:34 PM
Edward, the editing format is crap. Every time I try editing something, it ends up deleting half of my original post.
Trying again:
All of the spoken-singing lines, like the voicemails, were changed to regular dialogue, the sets were imaginative, and a definitive timeframe is given for the storyline: 1989 to 1990, the two years when New York was arguably at its worst. Rosario Dawson and Tracie Thoms are phenomenal (I complemented them as such at the afterparty; they were both very nice and gracious. I wish I could say the same about Idina Menzel — or her weird publicist-type person, at least, who assumed that Paco and I wanted to get her autograph and shooed us away. Bitch. The weird lady, not Menzel). I never would have seen that movie if, as I had heard floating around, Justin Timberlake was going to star in it.
They worked the Cat Scratch Club into the movie (for the first third of the song "Out Tonight"), which was cool. Likewise, a couple of flashbacks of Roger's dead girlfriend were put in during "One Song Glory": her catching his eye while he's playing a gig, them hooking up, them shooting up, them finding out they were HIV-positive. Nothing of her slitting her wrists, so it's implied that she died of the disease. Sad. "Take Me Or Leave Me" was set at an engagement party for Maureen and Joanne which wasn't in the musical, but it was a good move by whoever wrote the screenplay. "Without You" was accompanied by a montage of Roger caring for Mimi going through withdrawl from heroin addiction, Mimi relapsing and buying drugs again, and Collins caring for Angel as his HIV becomes full-blown AIDS and he begins to die. Overall, excellent.
The afterparty was decent. The Roseland was made up to look like an industrial loft. There was Chinese takeout and pastrami, to make no mention of wine and beer. Couldn't find any pasta with meatless balls, though, heh. Paco and I stayed there for about two hours. Hobnobbed with some people; I managed to talk to Cris Columbus and thank him for the tickets, as my uncle knows him and that's how I got them. I know, shameful. We also spoke to the hostess of the WB 11 morning show, who was there to cover the event. Like I said, we met Rosario and Tracie (Paco told Rosario that he was sorry that she moved to L.A., and she apologized for doing so. Paco wants her to bear his children, but she has a boyfriend.), as well as Taye Diggs (I'm taller than he is. Hehe.). After trying unsuccessfully to find Jesse L. Martin, we left — but not before we ran into Sara Silverman, who plays Alexi Darling, and Paco chatted it up with her. He impressed her by mentioning Greg the Bunny.
Questions, comments, etc.? I know I sound like an arrogant ass, but oh well.
BrooklynRider
November 23rd, 2005, 06:25 PM
I am biased toward the material to start, so it is hard for me to be completely objective toward the film. I thought it was great, but I've been a big fan of the show since its inception. I want it to succeed and be seen by as many people as possible.
I thought some scenes were better than others and some were just brilliant.
As I read the reviews, I've been struck by a number of things:
1) People seem to think that AIDS is over and irrelevant.
2) The negative reviews seem to completely miss the larger themes of the movie.
3) The criticism of the age disparity between the actors and their characters is fair. Yet, the actors in this case deliver performances that should diminish that argument as their age does not distract from the story.
4) The reviews seem to be coming down along "red state" / "blue state" lines and are using the subject matter to further fuel "culture wars."
5) Some of the criticisms of the story seem reasonable. However, an understanding of the genesis of the project and the real-life influences that brought the story to the stage make major revisions unacceptable.
6) There are a lot of people out there who think messages of hope, compassion, joy are saccharine and and souless. Those people come off sounding cold, bitter and, most disturbing, ignorant.
It's a show you love or hate. But, it didn't win the Pulitizer Prize for nothing.
The screening I saw had Adam Pascal (Roger) , Anthony Rapp (Mark) , Wilson Jermaine Heredia (Angel) and Traci Thoms (Joanne) participating in a post-screening Q&A. As a fundraiser, the screening raised Friends In Deed $45,000. Not Bad.
lofter1
November 27th, 2005, 11:57 PM
Chitty Chitty Bang, Rent
Fantasyland Bohemian Musical Is Now a Movie,
But 90’s Ghosts Are Not Dancin’
NY Observer
11/28/2005 edition
By Choire Sicha
http://www.observer.com/culture_observatory.asp
Speaking ill of Rent has always been comparable to tearing up a red AIDS ribbon on Eighth Avenue, or kicking one of those little AIDS babies you used to hear so much about but totally don’t anymore.
In fact, the night in February of 1996 that I saw the theatrical preview of Rent, I was warned into a sort of reverence, or at least silence, by my date. The show’s 35-year-old creator, Jonathan Larson, had dropped dead of a foot-long aortic tear just a few weeks previous, and the audience had adapted an Arlene Croce–meets–Patty Hearst sort of tactic: We can’t speak ill of this because of Mr. Larson’s death and, of course, that whole AIDS thing, and also everyone might hurt us if we do. Of course, everyone who saw it could have been equally psychotically enthusiastic, but that does seem unlikely.
My date worked with the agents of the Panamanian hottie Daphne Rubin-Vega, who starred in the play as Mimi, the junkie stripper with a heart full of gold and anti-retrovirals.
Ms. Rubin-Vega, sadly, didn’t make it into the cast of the new film version because she would be pregnant during filming, though, of course, she would be 36 by the time the film finally opened this Thanksgiving week. (On the other hand, my date that night would, the grapevine later said, soon become a crack addict or something and be forced to leave Manhattan for states less narcotically tempting. Life, art!)
But Ms. Rubin-Vega looked so young that night back in 1996. And, after I spent those two or so awful hours in musical-theater agony, watching the history of AIDS and the East Village being savagely rewritten with my mouth clamped closed, my eyes silently rolling, I saw her saying her hellos at the front of the New York Theater Workshop. She was wet from her exertions. “Well, good luck with this!” is what I think I said to her—the sort of thing that so many Manhattanites must regularly say to an actress who is giving her all to a crappy play that is going to shortly and disgracefully close.
Whoops.
"IN NO TIME THERE WERE LIMOUSINES PULLING UP in front of the New York Theater Workshop; people were coming who had never been to the funky East Village before in their lives,” wrote Cynthia O’Neal, the executive director of the H.I.V. support program Friends In Deed, in the December 2005 issue of Out. “Obviously, the drama of Jonathan’s death was a part of what drew them …. ”
Rent would move to Broadway in just a few months, on April 29, 1996, at which point it would immediately begin raping the history of the East Village before a maximum-capacity audience. It’s still running there.
For those who have somehow not been assaulted, this is what happens in Rent: Two guys, Roger and Mark, live together in some monster loft in the East Village and are being evicted by their friend-turned-landlord. The year is unspecified, the plot a reworking of La Bohème. Guitar-playing Roger can’t write a song, and Mark—who has been jilted by his lady friend for another lady—can’t make a film. Roger meets the whore downstairs, Mimi, who, like him, is H.I.V.-positive. Their drag-queen friend Angel dies of AIDS. Everyone is varying shades of taupe to brown, political markers that are never remarked upon. Roger and Mark sing, “We’re dying in America to come into our own.” Mimi takes up with the landlord, disappears, comes back a shivering heroin mess and croaks. Roger sings her the song it took him a year to write, and she comes back to life. Mark plays his film, which sucks. The curtain comes down and, presumably, they senesce and die in due time.
It is, in short, a story about the narcissism of the young in troubled times.
It is also a retelling of a local AIDS crisis that never got a chance to be told in the first place, cleaned up and viewed through a heterosexual filter, with all the shitting and anger and ****ing and life removed, the very opposite of Rebecca Brown’s 1994 novel The Gifts of the Body, perhaps the most accurate book about illness ever written. Unlike that book, Rent was a period piece that came too soon: It relegated any idea of crisis to a fabled past.
But the real story of Rent happened outside the theater. Rent became the perfect peg for writers to discuss a changing city, to discuss a neighborhood that was changing hands from the non-working poor to the working poor.
Still, what that story was exactly was unclear, even sometimes contradictory.
In August of 1996, according to Trip Gabriel in the New York Times Styles section, the East Village was the “home of the casually hip and ‘thrift store meets hot citrus’ fashions, where H.I.V.-positive musicians mix with transvestites and anarchist squatters.”
But the very next month, Neil Strauss wrote in The Times that he had moved out of Alphabet City when he “heard a couple getting held up at gunpoint” outside his window, and noted that St. Mark’s Place had changed into “a strip mall with chains like the Gap and Subway.”
Some tried to make sense of Rent’s actual relation to the East Village. “I live around the corner from the real thing,” Bernard Holland had written in the same paper back in March, “and what I see and hear on the streets has an edge that the earnest practitioners of Rent can’t quite summon.”
The real thing. In November of 1996, the musical had already entered “the third stage of its young life,” according to William Grimes in The New York Times; its first out-of-town production opened in Boston that month, and touring companies would be unleashed in Canada and the U.K.
By then, there was nothing that anyone could do. The marketplace was hungry. Ed Siegel, reviewing the local production in The Boston Globe that month, issued a warning, noting “the emptiness of its bohemianism”: “In terms of content, Rent is little more than a fashion statement,” he said. “One leaves the theater humming the clothes.” In that, he sounded like Mr. Holland, who had described a “college-dorm patness to the show’s social politics.”
Dorms? We’ve got those all over. They built one right over the randy porno booths at the corner of 14th Street and Third Avenue, in fact.
NOVEMBER OF 1996 WAS ALSO THE MONTH that The New York Times Magazine published a treatise by Andrew Sullivan called “When Plagues End.” It was billed as a “a reflection on the passing of a crisis.” As went the approximately late-80’s AIDS period piece that was Rent, so went Mr. Sullivan, at 8,455 words.
Mr. Sullivan, who tested positive himself in 1993, believed that an era had suddenly come to an end. “And even now, among friends,” he wrote, “there are those who refuse to be tested for a virus that, thanks to the new treatments, might be eliminated from the bloodstream.”
This bizarre misrepresentation of the efficacy of protease inhibitors was outlandish. But what the piece revealed was Mr. Sullivan’s own politics of narcissism and powers of wish fulfillment—and really, it was hard to blame him for wanting AIDS to be over, though wanting it to be so didn’t make it any more true. “Death is less an event than an environment,” Mr. Sullivan had written more accurately, back in 1990 in The New Republic.
Mr. Sullivan reaffirmed his crisis-over beliefs early this month in The New Republic, in a piece called “The End of Gay Culture.”
“ … [T]he plague receded in the face of far more effective HIV treatments in the mid-’90s,” he wrote.
But Mr. Sullivan’s ill-conceived 1996 AIDS article did actually reflect a public emotional change, though it may have been a period piece that came too soon as well, and in many ways, everyone just felt that AIDS was over. Or had become something like diabetes—serious, chronic, but treatable, not tragic; finally, almost normal.
There were fewer funerals, after all. So AIDS as a crisis had its funeral in the form of Rent; like a visit to a memorial plaza, kids from New Jersey could come and get a sort-of sense of what AIDS used to be like (filtered, of course, through heterosexual experience); New Yorkers could come and maybe have a chance to catch their breath and grieve over what it was like, that past that had passed away.
Crisis averted.
LAST WEEK, ON NOV. 18—which was also Daphne Rubin-Vega’s birthday—the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report issued a lengthy report called Trends in HIV/AIDS Diagnoses. This was the first year for which such long-term trends would be announced here, since New York had only instituted name-based H.I.V. diagnosis reporting in June 2000.
What we learned is that, among the 33 states that report them to the C.D.C., 20 percent of all reported new H.I.V. diagnoses in the United States occur in New York—though it should be noted that California, which generally has the second-highest number of AIDS cases, doesn’t report in this group.
We learned that the number of new cases being reported in gay and bisexual men is up 8 percent from 2003 to 2004.
We learned that in these 33 states, 68,434 gay and bisexual men tested positive between 2001 and 2004.
Each year of the last four years, on average, across those 33 states, 39,313 people have been informed that they are positive.
It’s been eight years since Mr. Sullivan’s article. And these numbers are only for people who actually get tested, and then only those who return for their test results.
“The new developments are deeply gratifying, but for many of us, a persistent air of skepticism remains,” wrote New York artist Karl Michalak in 1996 to The New York Times Magazine in response to Mr. Sullivan’s article. His letter was published on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day. “It’s hard to dance in the streets when your feet have gone numb,” he wrote.
Mr. Michalak died the next year, in June. The cast of Rent had been dancing on a Broadway stage for 14 months.
Is the crisis of AIDS over yet? Was it even over then?
CHRIS COLUMBUS' FILM VERSION OF RENT is extraordinarily, even unimaginatively, faithful to the stage version.
But not since The Day After Tomorrow has New York City itself been so faithlessly rendered on the big screen.
What the hell skyline is this? What’s this F-train stop doing at the corner of 10th and Avenue B? Why has the Life Café been moved down the road? What is this mysterious block on which these kids live? At one point, street signs seem to indicate that it’s Avenue A and 10th Street, which makes no sense.
It is, of course, not a cinéma vérité project. It’s still an idea of a neighborhood and a crisis—and a gloss on both, and on the neighbors that commingle there. The word “****,” as I recall, is spoken exactly once in the film. There is but one shot of a needle aimed for a thin forearm. All in all, it’s about as gritty as the Rent Cycle Karaoke class that takes place at the 38th Street Crunch on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. It makes the East Village look a little less authentic than Sesame Street, a little more than It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s illusory, despicable and the worst sort of rewriting of history, because that history has actually never really been written in the first place.
But even East Village playwright and novelist Sarah Schulman—who never pursued her claim of plagiarism against Jonathan Larson’s estate after she found that her 1990 novel People in Trouble closely resembled half the plot of Rent—couldn’t blame Larson, though she trounced Rent up one side of Tompkins Square Park and down the other in her 1998 book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America.
“It is seductive to see one’s self translated into acceptable codes of behavior,” Ms. Schulman wrote, “and therefore depicted in an approving way, even if the details are false and the approval illusory.” Rent, to her, was as baffling a lie as Philadelphia, in which a heterosexual lawyer comes to the rescue of the poor people with AIDS.
In 1999, Ms. Schulman turned her attention briefly to Andrew Sullivan as well, in an interview in The Advocate. In it, he is baffled by and dismissive of her fury as she routs him on a number of topics: abortion, biological determinism, sex radicalism.
“There are debates that take place within a few blocks of lower Manhattan,” Mr. Sullivan finally told her, “and then there are debates that actually take place.”
Like Rent itself, Mr. Sullivan gets to speak for a group of people who have largely gone missing. Don’t count on either of them to tell you how or why.
“The vast majority agree with much of what I say,” he reminded Ms. Schulman. He should have added, “The vast majority of those who remain.”
Just the same, the local debates in the East Village over gentrification and AIDS politics and the life of the artist—which apparently did not actually take place—will never take place again.
Citytect
November 30th, 2005, 03:11 AM
I've never seen the musical so this was my first "Rent" experience. I thought the character of Angel was ridiculously underdeveloped. It was hard for me to relate to the other characters' mourning given that Angel only had, at most, a couple scenes with any significant action or dialogue, and even then I didn't really get a sense of the "inspiration" of which the others spoke.
That's pretty consistant with the stage musical.
I saw the movie version tonight. I thought it was as good as the stage version - not better, not worse. Both are good but not great, in my opinion.
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