It was a flop, but the film adaptation of the Broadway smash turned me on to theater. And those starving artists made me want to make art too.
To think: There was a point in my life when I didn’t know all the words to “Seasons of Love” — or hadn’t even heard of it at all. In 2005, the movie adaptation of the Broadway smash “Rent” gave me my introduction to what would become — and still remains — my favorite musical, though my understanding of it has evolved from the time I was a teenager obsessed with maverick life in New York City. Though I’d seen some glitzy Broadway productions like “The Lion King” and “Aida” as a kid, I was totally unaware of what the world of theater had to offer, even as renowned shows like “Rent” were enjoying runs just a Long Island Rail Road ride away. I discovered my favorite musical in a way theater die-hards might find gauche — via the widely panned film adaptation of “Rent,” a flop. But that movie eventually led me to the real deal onstage. When I was 15, “Rent” appeared, unceremoniously, on our kitchen counter, in a cheap paper envelope. The art on the disc inside was fuzzily reproduced, with blurry lines and sloppy color bleeds, clearly from a home printer. It was a bootleg copy, among a handful of other bootlegs my father had picked up in his travels, and I popped it into the DVD player dispassionately, thinking I was in for some cheesy, B-list drama. But then there was the opening: silence, the black screen and the lone notes of the piano, before the lights go up on a stage and the cast sings “Seasons of Love” — “525,600 minutes” — and Jesse L. Martin and Tracie Thoms uplift the ensemble number with triumphant, soaring solos. If that hadn’t caught my interest, the break into the raucous fury of the title song would have done the trick. The show’s songs share the DNA of the music I already loved: lively rock, both a bit pop and punk in its sensibility, and the song “Rent,” set against the frenzy of Lower Manhattan, made a fierce statement. Based loosely on the Puccini opera “La Bohème,” about a group of artist friends and lovers in 19th-century Paris, whose Mimi has tuberculosis, “Rent” takes these bohemians and places them in New York during the H. I. V. and AIDS crisis. Directed by Chris Columbus (“Mrs. Doubtfire,” the first two “Harry Potter” films), the movie, which includes moody lighting and shots showcasing the highs and lows of the city — the artists perched up on the fire escapes, the homeless squatting on the sidewalks — creating an electric sense of city life, where ignited eviction notices can rain down on the street of the Lower East Side on a regular Sunday night. For a kid who loved making art and felt stifled by her comfortable but dull and conservative upbringing in the suburbs of Long Island, this vision of artist life in New York was seductive and endlessly captivating. Roger (Adam Pascal), a morose H. I. V.-positive musician with writer’s block, was my favorite from the first moment he appeared onscreen, pouty and leather-jacketed and solemnly strumming his guitar in the dark, cold apartment loft.
