PUBLISHED October 5th, 2016 06:30 am | UPDATED July 25th, 2024 03:02 pm
This October, Pangdemonium is celebrating the 20th anniversary of revolutionary rock musical, RENT, which is also its anchor production in the company’s 2016 Season of Love.
A re-imagining of Puccini’s La Bohème that draws on Jonathan Larson’s experiences living in Manhattan’s East Village in the 1980s, RENT follows an unforgettable year in the lives of seven artists struggling to follow their dreams without selling out. With its inspiring message of joy and hope in the face of fear, this timeless story of friendship and creativity reminds us to measure our lives with the only thing that truly matters – love.
After opening off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop on February 13, 1996 to ecstatic reviews, the production transferred to Broadway less than three months later. In the same year, RENT won the Tony Award for Best Musical as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
RENT could be called a “Rock Opera” as there is very little narrative. The story centers on Mark, a filmmaker and also the play’s narrator, and his friends: Roger, a rocker, Mimi, an exotic dancer and Roger’s love interest; Tom Collins, cyberpunk-teacher-anarchist; Angel, a cross-dressing street performer; Maureen, Mark’s ex-girlfriend-turned-lesbian performance artist; Joanne, Maureen’s uptight lawyer girlfriend; and Benjamin “Benny” Coffin III, their ex-roommate-turned-landlord former friend, as they try to live in the age that frowns upon human relationships due to the AIDS epidemic.
A story that resonates with all ages, Pangdemonium’s RENT will be brought to life by a cast of rising performers including: Benjamin Chow (Best Supporting Actor, The LKY Musical, 2016 Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards) as Mark, Cameron MacDonald as Roger, Aaron Khaled as Angel, Tabitha Nauser as Mimi, and Mina Kaye (Best Actress, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, 2015 Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards) as Maureen, a wild-child performance artist.
We chat with Director Tracie Pang, who gave us her insights on the production:
It’s great that Pangdemonium is ending its season with RENT. How are you planning to capture the feel of 1990s bohemian New York City at the height of the AIDS epidemic?
The play is set in ’89/90 and we knew that there is no way that you can update the piece as the AIDS virus is now in a very different place. Back then, finding out you had AIDS was pretty much a death sentence. I remember visiting New York during that period, and it was quite a scary and dirty place – not the city that we see now. We’ve tried to keep that grit and grime in the set design, looking at abandoned buildings and NY roof tops of the period. With the direction of the piece, I’m trying to create a community that is borne out of adversity that comes together in love.
What were the challenges when you were looking for a cast for this show?
Because RENT is based on an opera, most of the roles are musically challenging. I needed to look for singing ability that could match the score, and I needed to find actors that could live in the skin of these characters. It was not an easy process and we auditioned for about 6 months; it feels like we saw every actor in Singapore. We also had people sending us audition tapes from Australia, US, Canada, UK as we really didn’t want to just take the “can do lah” attitude to fill the numbers.
It’s lovely that younger people can attend selected shows. Many of the them will be too young to remember the original RENT or even the AIDS epidemic – will they be able to relate to this production?
I think younger audiences will still relate to that struggle of being an artist in a commercial world and how to stand on your own two feet when you leave the safety of family and school and have start deciding what kind of person you are. They may not remember the AIDS epidemic or even be aware that AIDS is still an ongoing concern, but we hope that this production will make young people aware.
Just because it is not given much air time these days doesn’t mean it has been eradicated. Young people are still catching AIDS in Singapore and around the world and once you have it, it can be treated but not cured, you have it for life, so we need to still make our young people aware of the AIDS virus and how to avoid it.
What is the biggest challenge when putting on a production like RENT, which is so well known?
That’s exactly it! It’s so well known and so many people have said ‘that’s one of my favourite musicals’ so there is a pressure to please, or to give people what they want. But at the same time, there is little artistic merit from copying, so while I don’t want to reinvent the wheel and disappoint people, I do want add some elements and focus on the story telling which often gets lost in the love for the songs.
What can we expect from Pangdemonium in 2017?
We have just launched our 2017 season and are very excited to announce that we shall be starting the year with The PILLOWMAN by Martin McDonagh. It has been 10 years since we last did it and it’s the play that Adrian and I get asked the most to revisit so we thought with a 10-year gap, there will also be a whole new audience for it.
We are also doing our first new play. We’ve commissioned Joel Tan to write a new piece titled TANGO, and finally we shall be doing last years Tony Award winning musical FUN HOME by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori.
RENT runs from 7 to 23 October 2016 at the Drama Centre Theatre, National Library Singapore. Tickets are available at SISTIC.
All images courtesy of Crispian Chan.