Wednesday, February 08, 2006

RENT!!!

My passion is theater, and my passion within my passion is musicals. I admit, I am a musical theater buff. My earliest debut was a number of home performances from Annie at the age of 4 and continued from there. My life is one big musical - if the moment is appropriate, I will sing a song to go with it. I'd say my four favorite musicals are Rent, Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera and Wicked. My husband knows to carefully word a request for the time, for if he says "What's the time?", I'll respond by singing, "It's gotta be close to midnight..." (Rent, Out Tonight) regardless of the hour. My CD collection in the car is usually scorned by certain family members, due to the large number of musicals in liue of, oh, U2 or the like.

The trend these days is to turn popular and profitable musicals into movies, to allow larger audiences to see the show (and in my opinion becauser there aren't many good movie ideas out there and Hollywood execs are desperate...). Thus, with great anticiption, I have patiently been waiting for Rent to make it's screen debut. I've seen it twice on Broadway, completely worn out my Rent soundtrack and The Best of Rent CD, not to mention having gone through a period where I swore I would be the first white Mimi. I know every nuance, every note of the show by heart.

Finally, 2 weeks ago, it arrived. I was finishing up my semester, and was completely swamped, and did not get a chance to see it until Saturday night. Ahhh, be still my beating heart. Granted, I have critique. Hey, you're reading the blog of a woman who caused her cousin to miss most of the show because her lip synching was causing uncontrolable laughter. I was suspicious of some of the plot changes, certain changes in words, cutting out songs (how they could cut out the finale to Act I I'll never know). However, certain changes were plot enhancing, and there were some great guest appearances (yay Anna Deavere Smith!).

The greatest thrill for me was the fact that almost the entire original cast was in the film. This was no star-studded production, but had gone back to those actors who had made it a hit. I so appreciated the integrity of the filmakers in that respect.

To summarize - I laughed, cried and lip synched to EVERY SINGLE SONG. Luckily for myself and my friends, there were only 3 other people in the theater with us, so we got to make ourself comfortable, and kick the chairs in front of us to the beat of the songs.

VIVA LA VIE BOHEME!!!

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