I'm writing to be the yang to Mr. Morris' yin. We produced RENT: School Edition in 2011 and found it to be a wonderful, worthwhile experience for our school community.
It was a hard sell, initially, to our administration, who did not look forward to answering questions from our parent body (that did not need to happen, by the way. The parents were wonderful!) and our musical director who was not too keen on doing a rock show, and instead recommended something by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Gilbert and Sullivan. But he too came around once we began work on the show.
When it came time for auditions, we had kids showing up who'd never been in a production before. They just wanted to be a part of RENT. So we had an enthusiastic cast with a wider range of abilities than we usually get. I had decided to cap the cast number at 25, knowing that our approach to the material would require a greater amount of trust and support than our last production, Anything Goes, did.
I contacted an organization that works with the homeless and asked if they could send someone to talk to the cast about homelessness in the city (we are just outside of DC, which has a large homeless population with a high percentage being HIV-positive. The shelter representative knew the show and tailored her remarks to address those issues raised in the libretto.) I contacted the local HIV/AIDS organization who also presented to the cast. We agreed to having both these groups, along with the the Marfan Foundation, set up tables in the lobby during performances.
Our biggest challenge, which we tackled right from the start, was getting our kids who were very familiar with the show, the movie, and the cast album to see the show in a new light and to really find ways to connect to the content instead of relying on their preconceived ideas. We did a lot of work right off the bat on Seasons of Love, which they all knew but never really considered. Once they really understood it, what it was about, and what it meant to each cast member personally, it became a galvanizing element in our rehearsals and warm-ups.
I worked very hard to create OUR production of RENT. No ugly scarf for Mark. No hat for Collins. No Santa dress and zebra stockings for Angel. (We played the character as a "club kid"- very androgynous- and appropriate for the time period. It made it easier for a high school boy to fully invest in the character. ) I worked with the students to discover their interpretations of the characters and find costumes that worked. The ensemble played homeless people, entering the theatre in character from the lobby with the audience, finding their way to the stage.
We spent a lot of time working with the students on vocal projection, on appropriate ways to support their voices, and on ways to take care of their voices. By the time we came to production week, the kids knew how to warm up, sense the onset of vocal strain, and respond to it. They came out of the production better singers than when they went in.
We found the characters to be very relatable once they were put into context. The libretto deals so well with loneliness, fear of rejection, isolation, and the overwhelming need for friendship and love, subjects that are on the minds of many high school students. That's where we started to build the characters.
I agree with Mr. Morris that the ending is pretty tough to pull off believably. We spent way too much time trying to nuance Mimi's "death" and not make it so improbable and possibly funny. We found a way to make it work better, although no one was 100% sold on it.
One of our students approached me about filming a documentary about the making of our production. He worked from the premise that this show would push our students outside their comfort zones and have them discover things about themselves that, through the production process, they'd be willing to share with each other and with our audiences. He filmed every rehearsal, from the auditions through to the warm-ups on opening night. (He did not film the shows.) After we closed, he arranged to meet with each member of the cast, crew, and creative team to interview them about their experience. We watched the documentary, 2 hours +, about 3 months after we closed. Our kids were honest and self-critical, talking about how working on such a challenging show, with challenging material and a challenging score, helped them to understand themselves and our school community.
For us, doing RENT: School Edition was an important and memorable experience. At the end, we had stronger actors, stronger singers, and a stronger, more empathetic community.
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Michael Bergman
Teacher/Director
Alexandria VA
Original Message:
Sent: 11-20-2015 12:18
From: John Morris
Subject: Convincing admin to produce Rent
I would ask yourself first why you want to do Rent? In the last week of our run of Rent, I have come to some conclusions about the show itself.
It's not a very good libretto. Ask anyone who just walks in and sees it without knowing much about the musical and they'd be hard-pressed to give you the basic plot line when it's over. The characters spend a great deal of time scream-singing over each other really important plot points and character development, to the point where most of the show is unintelligible.
The characters aren't particularly likable, and quite often I find myself having no feelings of connection or empathy for any of them.
The music, while catchy in places, and downright iconic in a few (Seasons of Love), is overall repetitive, and (especially in act 2) mostly clunky and un-musical-y.
The ending is improbable, unbelievable and perhaps even laughable. And the show as the School Edition is still about 40 MINUTES TOO LONG.
It stirs up controversy. Even at our fairly progressive school there were some members of the community who took great exception to our performing this musical. Several years ago another local high school did it and it ended up in a lawsuit. (Eventually the courts decided in the school's favor, but what a major energy waste that was.)
It's very difficult. VERY difficult. My sound guy (who is one of the best in the business here in Vegas) has worked with us for nearly a decade and he said that this show was BY FAR the most difficult he ever put together. It's wireless mics, it's mixing a rock band, it's a backline monitor system, it's video projection, it's LOUD. High school students are being made to sing like adults, and often the show sounds less-than-honest and immature out of the mouths of high school-aged singers. It's also very strenuous to sing, and we have been nursing our actors through the production.
Not to be a killjoy on this one, but I have found that even a successful and popular production of Rent (and ours was pretty dang good) it's still not very theatrically satisfying, especially as performed by teenagers. Some shows just don't work with teenagers. I'd recommend Quilt: A Musical Celebration if you want to have a good, engaging conversation about HIV and AIDS, compassion, tolerance and loss. And you can actually understand and feel empathy for those characters. They're more - REAL.
So there's my 2¢. Like I said, it's being well-received, but will probably go down as unmemorable and ultimately unsatisfying when it's all sung and done. I sound like a hater, but being in the thick of it right now, I still wish we had gone another way, and chosen a more high-school appropriate show to broach a discussion about these deep, complicated and mature social issues.
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John Morris
Instructor/Technical Director
Clark County School District
Las Vegas NV