How Can You Measure ‘Rent’?
Take the Tonys, for example: Four newcomers from the musical’s ensemble cast have been nominated; two had never acted professionally before
A FEW MONTHS AGO, Daphne Rubin-Vega was on her knees vigorously scrubbing the floor of the tenement where she worked as a sculptor’s assistant when her employer’s husband walked in.
“Daphne,” he said, shocked, “what are you doing that for?”
“Well,” she said with a theatrical sigh, “I guess I’m playing Cinderella.”
This, it turns out, was no joke. Born in Panama, orphaned as a child, Rubin-Vega grew up feeling, she says, “like an odd duck.” This week, the singer with the swan neck and the tiger eyes was nominated for a Tony Award – in the same category as Julie Andrews.
At the same time she was scrubbing that floor four months ago, Wilson Heredia had just quit his job answering complaints about clogged toilets; Adam Pascal, having just broken up “Mute,” the band he had started in ninth grade with his pals in Woodbury, was gently prodding fat people into shape as a personal trainer for a gym on the Upper West Side; Idina Menzel was singing “The Wind Beneath My Wings” at a bar mitzvah at Leonard’s of Great Neck for the thousandth time.
They, too, were nominated this week for Tony Awards, all of them for their roles in “Rent.” Two of the four had never even acted professionally before. The announcement came on the day David Geffen gathered the young cast members to begin recording what may well become a hit album, judging from “Rent’s” previous magic.
In a matter of months, “Rent,” the musical about life among young bohemians in the East Village, has turned from a promising show to an astonishing fairy tale – and not just one fairy tale, but many.
“All of us came from a long, rocky road,” says Heredia, who plays the character Angel, and in real life still lives with his immigrant family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “We all gravitated to this play by way of fate.”
Five-hundred twenty-five thousand six-hundred minutes
How do you measure . . . measure a year?
Five-hundred twenty-five thousand six-hundred minutes
How can you measure the life of a woman or man?
– “Seasons of Love” from “Rent”
On the door to the Nederlander Theater, an all-but-abandoned building on West 41st Street that was renovated just for the Broadway opening of “Rent” two weeks ago, there is now a cryptic work of art full of numbers and symbols, part of the art gallery that lines the vestibule in an attempt to re-create the feel of the East Village where the show began. The people behind “Rent” use the numbers and the symbols in the painting as their own measure of the story of the musical that is, in many ways, more extraordinary than the story in the musical.
The first number on the painting is “1858,” which is the year of birth of Giacomo Puccini, who wrote the opera “La Boheme,” on which “Rent” is based. Then there is “1960,” the year of birth of Jonathan Larson, the composer and lyricist who waited tables at the Moondance Diner in Soho while he worked for seven years trying to bring his rock musical to life. The painting discreetly omits the date of his death – this year, on Jan. 25. Larson died suddenly at the age of 35 of an aortic aneurysm on the last day of rehearsals, before the first public performance of “Rent” at the downtown New York Theater Workshop.
Also on the painting are the numbers “40 74,” the latitude and longitude of New York City, the word “Feb,” the month the musical opened in the East Village to astounding critical praise, and “15:00 h,” the hour (expressed ironically in military parlance) that the Pulitzer committee announced that “Rent” had won this year’s prize for drama.
The “Rent” people may have to add other numbers to the door – certainly “10,” the number of Tony nominations it received this week, more than any other show, and maybe 1 million, which is easily the number of words that magazines and newspapers (and the amount of footage that TV stations) have devoted to the show, with no end in sight.
But some things about “Rent” cannot be so easily quantified, such as what it has meant to the young cast. They talk of turning points and of dreams, but, if this sounds like the old lullaby of Broadway, listen again. This is a different generation.
“It’s been my dream my whole life,” Adam Pascal was saying, “to meet Billy Joel. And he came backstage!” Before “Rent,” Pascal had never been in a play, never even thought about being in one. “Even the idea of auditioning was exciting to me,” he said, “because I never did it before.” What he always wanted to be, he said, is a rock star. What’s more, he still wants to be a rock star.
But he admits he is affected by the intense reaction of the audience. “People come up to you and say, ‘Thank you.’ It’s not ‘I love you; you have a great voice.’ It’s some kind of deep gratitude they have about the show itself.”
Idina Menzel, who also grew up in Woodbury, used to fantasize about getting to go to a big awards ceremony, but the award she had in mind was a Grammy. She, too, never acted on the stage before, and at 16 switched from an “Annie” wannabe to dreams of succeeding Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin. “I wanted to get up a sweat and throw my hair around.” As Maureen the performance artist in “Rent,” she gets to do just that.
Daphne Rubin-Vega already has had some success as a recording artist with a No. 1 dance single, “I Found It.” But to hear her tell it, in “Rent” she has found something, too: a place to fit in. “My real father died when I was two,” says Daphne. “My real mother died when I was ten.” She was brought up by a stepfather. “As far back as I can remember, I wasn’t really a geek, but I was a freak.”
Wilson Jermaine Heredia, whose parents came from the Dominican Republic, attended Mabel Dean Bacon Vocational High School in Manhattan, which trains students to become nurses, before launching a career that included a play at Lincoln Center. (He and Rubin-Vega are the two with acting experience.) “My family wanted me to be a doctor. I said, ‘Mom, I’ve got to dance, I’ve got to sing, I’ve got to perform!’ She said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it.’ ”
The family has since come around.
“I get paid to sing and act and dance – and the play actually means something. Who could ask for anything more?” Heredia says, unconsciously quoting a Gershwin song from an old Broadway show.