Where death ain’t no cabaret: Viva ‘Rent’!

Once in a blue moon, a new musical comes along that changes everything. In 1996, the musical was Rent, and just as it changed the landscape of Broadway and musical theater, it is a musical that quite possibly changed my life.

Funnily enough, I encountered this Pulitzer award-winning piece, not along the streets of Broadway in one of my travels to New York, but at a corner section of Odyssey music, in an obscure mall in Pangasinan during a respite of the 1998 campaigns.

What caught my attention was this glimmer of a cast recording of a Philippine production that I was too young to see then — an artifact that was gathering dust amidst a sea of Jolina Magdangal’s Paper Roses, Aaron Carter, and Regine (and Cacai) Velasquez CDs and cassettes. There it sat: the Rent that everyone in school was raving about — the musical whose song became a staple at convocation, that song which had “525,600 minutes” seemingly on repeat.

I came to know that Rent, a musical written by Jonathan Larson, was his love letter to the ‘90s; a musical that immortalized the ebb and flow of the times; a peek into the underside of New York’s Alphabet city where HIV and AIDS were as real as the threats of the Vietnam War in the musical Hair, or the French Revolution in Les Miserables; where, in its Dostoyevskian, ephemeral state, life is measured, not by how much money we spend, or how many achievements we rack, but by how much love we give and how much love we get in return. The lyrics seemed to say, “Measure your life in love.” I couldn’t help but wonder: How did I measure mine?

Seasons of Love was a duet I shared with my sister KC back when she was still alive. She passed away in 2004, not due to AIDS as a certain Angel did in the musical, or most of Larson’s friends in real life who he had in mind when he wrote the show (he would succumb to an aortic complication, a night before Rent’s first preview), but from a fire that gutted our home on Christmas day — also the time in which the musical’s retelling of Puccini’s La Boheme takes off.

Broadway critic Frank Rich wrote, “It’s very hard for the next generation of Sondheims, Kander, and Ebbs... to come along,” what with the tradition of Broadway being so succinct. You’d had to have been a revolutionary with unparalleled conviction to penetrate its musical zeitgeist. Larson, with his balls to the wall and One Song Glory, was that gem of a composer that dared to try.

“He was someone who wanted to be as much a part of a musical theater tradition, and (then) blow it up, change it, and reinvent,” says James Nicola of the New York Theater Workshop, the group that gifted Rent with its own marquee on Broadway. Just as Stephen Sondheim, Larson’s great inspiration, had done when he ransacked Broadway with his discursive kind of lyrical theater, the young composer wrote the rock opera of his life that, though short-lived, left aftershocks in the theater community that are continuously felt to this day.

“Forget regret, for life is yours to miss…” was a lyric in the song No Day But Today whose reprise closes the second act. Slaving away in the corporate world to which I owe a lot of my 20-something mettle to, I felt like I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, like my soul was being sucked out of me. I was Roger, Rent’s protagonist; the frustrated artist; the guy who was meant to live his life doing what he loves; but had neither the courage nor spirit to take the plunge. My One Song Glory became one long story — that is, one long story of running away and excuses.

Growing weary with my job, I decided to join a bunch of my friends in putting up a theater company. In 2010, we decided to do Rent and bring it back to Manila 10 years after it was first staged. While all and good with the kind of reception it garnered after three runs, it became my personal wakeup call and reunification with the songs that I once sang with my sister.

The musical became a reminder of who I was, and who I was meant to be. No Day But Today became my liquid courage to leave a life of certainty like Larson, and pursue something I have loved since the very beginning — theater and the performing arts. I think it’s what my sister would’ve wanted — to measure my life in love.

“What happened in the days after his death was that (Larson) became a part of the musical, and those issues in the musical about loss, pounding our ears, beating our chest, we all sort of took a lesson from the musical on how to move forward,” said Rent’s director on Broadway Michael Greif. It may as well have been my own sentiments and love letter to Jonathan Larson — the guy who gifted a generation raised on rock ‘n’ roll and MTV with a musical they could call their own. Viva la vie boheme!