La Vie Boheme is not mort. On the contrary, it is shiny and perky as all get out. That could be a problem for those who consider Rent, the late Jonathan Larson’s groundbreaking 1996 rock musical, a gritty yet ultimately hopeful tribute to young people struggling to survive in the bohemian squatter scene of New […]
Archives for January 28, 2019
Rent remembered: The young stars who created the roles, and Allen Ginsberg’s reaction to Rent’s bohemia
In the month before Rent opened Off-Broadway in January, 1996, Idina Menzel was singing “The Wind Beneath My Wings” at a bar mitzvah at Leonard’s of Great Neck for the thousandth time; Daphne Rubin-Vega was working as a sculptor’s assistant, scrubbing her boss’s floor and feeling like Cinderella; Adam Pascal, having just broken up “Mute,” […]
Review: Heidi Schreck’s Grand Concourse marks the promising debut of Prologue Theatre
A line delivered by Frog, a homeless man, encapsulates the dilemma of Heidi Shreck’s play, Grand Concourse. Speaking in a soup kitchen filled with raw vegetables for chopping, he tells the security guard Oscar eating lunch with him that vegetables have feelings too. Frog offers a choice: to either become a predator or starve: “At […]