This is a great article that I read in the Sunday times today. A great read for anyone who loves the east village. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the article
“I WAS late to “Rent.” Late to the show, and late to the city it portrays. When I arrived in New York, in the fall of 1998, bistros and boutiques had already infiltrated the East Village, gentrification was spreading into the Lower East Side, and northwest Brooklyn had largely fallen to the forces of the bourgeoisie.”
“Now, 12 years later, it would be impossible to see the show and think it was set any time in the past decade. Much of “Rent” has become downright nostalgic, almost jarringly so. Several numbers revolve around pay phones and answering machines (20-somethings with answering machines!). Roger, the gloomy, HIV-positive guitarist with a nasty case of rocker’s block, plays gigs at CBGB, then a landmark of the New York underground music scene, now a menswear boutique. A group of lefty hipsters talk politics with no mention of anyone named Cheney or even the first Bush.”
“THERE is a fascinatingly antagonistic attitude among the characters toward virtual reality and what they call cyberland. The creation of a cyber studio on a lot on East 11th Street is the great evil of the musical, seemingly more ominous than AIDS or drugs, and yet if “Rent” took place today, half the characters in the show would be blogging.”
“The fact that “Rent” the musical sells merchandise and $250 tickets is no more “ironic” than the fact that you can buy a copy of “The Communist Manifesto” at a corporate-owned bookstore (or that you can see “La Bohème,” the Puccini opera on which “Rent” was based, at the Met). That’s just how the business works.
Likewise, it’s missing the point to accuse “Rent,” despite its characters’ struggles with AIDS and heroin addiction, of being inauthentic. Of course it’s inauthentic. It’s a musical. People sing and dance. Could you imagine what an authentic musical about East Village squatters would look like? (Curtain time: Whenever.) What about an authentic musical about Irish and Puerto Rican street gangs, or Navy sailors in the South Pacific in World War II? I’ll take the ones we’ve got, corny parts and all.”
read the whole article in the link below
‘Rent’ Nears Its Final Performance, but Its Ragtag New York Faded Away Years Ago – NYTimes.com