It's in the message.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

In Giacomo Puccini's opera "La Boheme," Mimi dies a tragic death. It takes her a while, but she dies. In Jonathan Larson's musical "Rent," Mimi gets a deathbed break. It's just a reprieve, but it's important.

``The theme of the show is really that there's `no day but today,' '' says 22-year-old Tallia Brinson, who sings that line as Mimi in the touring production of "Rent" that will come to the Hult Center next weekend.

Brinson sees Mimi's miraculous pull-back from the brink as "kind of cheesy" but also "very, very appropriate" to the show, in which four characters are HIV-positive and one dies of AIDS. By that point, she says, "We've already had one death, and to see another would be too much."

Instead, the one who has died, appropriately named Angel, heads Mimi off and encourages her "to turn around and just live as long as she can," Brinson said in a telephone interview from San Jose, Calif.

It's not spoiling the plot to reveal that Mimi doesn't really die in "Rent." The immensely popular 10-year-old musical, based on Puccini's opera, won the Pulitzer Prize, four Tony Awards and every award that the New York theater world has to bestow. Puccini's Mimi has been dying for more than 100 years in "La Boheme," and people still go to see her do it.

Will "Rent," which opened exactly 100 years after "La Boheme," demonstrate the same staying power? Brinson thinks it will.

"Like every musical, it has its time," she says, and after that a nostalgia factor kicks in for the long run.

"I think that's what `Rent' has become, even though it's only from the '90s,'' she says. "But it's still pertinent to things that are happening today. There are people who had the disease when they first saw this show and are still dealing with it."

Brinson believes the show's message about compassion, persistence and hope is so important that it shouldn't be limited to U.S. audiences. The show toured to Japan last year and has toured other countries "in little spurts," but she thinks it should go to places such as South Africa, where HIV and AIDS are widespread and the message is needed.

"I think it would do very well there," says Brinson, who has performed in South Africa. "The subject is so hush-hush there. They hardly ever talk about it because it's so common, and that makes it easy to give up."

Brinson has been playing Mimi for about a month. Originally from Springfield, Mass., she attended a high school for performing and visual arts in Atlanta and received her bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

She was on her way to a New York City audition for "Hairspray" when a friend steered her to auditions for "Rent," which were being held in the same building. She kept getting call-backs and finally got the role.

"I think I was the last lead to be cast," she says.

Rehearsals for the touring production began in July, and the company was still "sort of rehearsing" when they reached Portland to start the tour.

Arriving in Oregon threw the actor-singers for a loop, she says, but not in a bad way.

"We were all used to New York air, with the smog and everything else that's in it," she says. ``When we got to Portland, it was, like, AIR!''

Brinson plays an HIV-positive junkie who works as a dancer in an S&M club. Her love interest is Roger (Dan Rosenbaum), an HIV-positive rock musician whose HIV-positive girlfriend has committed suicide. Roger is holed up in his Lower East Side industrial loft trying to write one perfect song before he dies.

Andy Meeks plays Mark, a documentary filmmaker who is the show's narrator. The characters also include Maureen, a performance artist; Joanne, a lesbian lawyer; Tom, an HIV-positive philosophy teacher; Angel, an HIV-positive drag queen and street musician; and Benny, the landlord.

Brinson says her favorite Mimi song is "Out Tonight," a first-act number that shows her ``playful side, the feline in her, up on that scaffold.''

Mimi goes from one emotional extreme to the other during the play, Brinson says. "I think that's the best part of playing this character. It's so much fun to play her in both extremes."

"At first she has fun," she says, "and in the second act it all hits the fan. She learns things about herself and Roger and her friends and Angel, in relation to the disease."

The show's most emotionally powerful song, Brinson says, is "Goodbye, Love" in which the deathly ill Mimi bids Roger farewell after overhearing an angry exchange between Mark and Roger, who is planning to leave New York.

Since its off-Broadway premiere in February 1996 and its Broadway premiere in April of the same year, "Rent" has not only won awards and broken box office records but also has wowed critics, in and outside the Big Apple.

In the Miami Herald, Christine Dolen described the show as "a ground-breaking synthesis of rock's emotive immediacy and drama's heart-rending ability to tell a story that breaks your heart, even as it makes you feel more alive."

The San Diego Tribune called "Rent" "a terrific and terrifically moving show, working with a joyously versatile pop vocabulary, a soulful humanist impulse and a sense of humor."

Such words would be music to the ears of any playwright. But Jonathan Larson, who conceived "Rent" and wrote its book, music and lyrics, didn't really get to hear them. He died of an aortic aneurysm on Jan. 25, 1996, just after the show's final dress rehearsal for the off-Broadway opening.

The show - directed by Michael Greif with musical direction by Tim Weil, choreography by Marlies Yearby, set design by Paul Clay, costumes by Angela Wendt and lighting by Blake Burba - went on.

PREVIEW

Rent

When: 8 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Silva Concert Hall, Hult Center, Seventh Avenue and Willamette Street

How much: $27 to $52 (682-5000)

CAPTION(S):

``Rent'' deals with HIV among some young artists in New York. It is based on the opera "La Boheme," about a tubercular young woman and a Bohemian group of friends.