Rent control.
Having wowed Broadway, Rent begins its national tour. Will the road version cause the same antigay uproar now plaguing Angels in America?Just a year after its premiere on Broadway, Rent is a box-office legend. Virtually every performance of the smash-hit musical since April 1996 has been sold out. Now the show is preparing to fan out across the country and, indeed, the world. A London company is in the planning stages; a West Coast troupe bows in La Jolla, Calif., in July; and the first national touring company takes to the road in June after a lengthy run in Boston.
But as Rent hits the road, the proverbial question remains: Will it play in Peoria? With characters that include a drag queen and his boyfriend, a lesbian couple, and HIV sufferers of various genders and sexual stripes, the musical looks like a tough sell in the South and Midwest, where it will be teamed in "best of Broadway" subscription series with such innocuous fare as The King and I and Smokey Joe's Cafe.
Since Rent has no real equivalent among recent musicals, it's hard to predict how regional audiences will respond. But Angels in America--a nonmusical drama that, like Rent, won a Pulitzer prize with its depiction of gay themes--had a spotty track record on its 1995-96 road tour.
Jeffrey Seller, a producer of Rent both on Broadway and the road, is quick to dismiss the comparison between the two shows. "Rent is no Angels in America," he says. "Its political manifesto isn't as prominent as in Angels in America, though it's there. The first thing you think about with Angels is the urgency of its politics. With Rent the first things you think of are its wonderful characters and its music."
In Charlotte, N.C., however, some folks seem worried that Rent and Angels have all too much in common. Charlotte is the only U.S. city so far that has declined to present Rent. And that decision comes just as the city is embroiled in a headline-making political flap over Angels in America.
Explaining why she passed on Rent, Judith Allen, president of Charlotte's Blumenthal Center for the Performing Arts, said simply that the musical would be "too risky on a subscription series that's only four years old." (Allen did not return calls for further comment.) But the city's battle over Angels seems to contradict her judgment.
The Angels uproar began with a socially conservative, not to say homophobic, gesture: After the Charlotte Repertory Theater presented Angels last season and Six Degrees of Separation--another gay-themed play--this season, the Mecklenburg County Commission voted April 2 to withdraw its $2.5 million of support to the county's Arts and Science Council, which funds the theater.
"I don't think [such plays] project the kind of values and ideas that most people in our community feel comfortable with," says Commissioner Hoyle Martin, explaining the funding cut. "As an elected official responsible for determining how funds are spent, I have to make those judgments."
Martin maintains that his concerns are not personal. "I did not enter into this lightly," he insists. "I sat down with 48 members of the gay and lesbian community because I think you always have to listen to the other side, but in the end it only reaffirmed what I believe. There are many gay and lesbian people in Charlotte who are responsible citizens--they're living in sin, of course, but we're all responsible to God for that--and who I have no problem with. But I have a problem when some of them shove it in my face. I don't shove myself in their face."
What separates this National Endowment for the Arts-style controversy from others in the past is that Charlotte is having none of it. North Carolina's largest city has established itself as a progressive mecca of the New South. Instead of supporting the commission's attempt at censorship, an alliance of corporate executives, arts advocates, and gay activists has expressed outrage at the vote and vowed to oust Martin and his conservative allies during next year's election.
"This sends the wrong message to the community and the world," says Carroll Gray, president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, speaking of the vote. "For the past couple of decades, Charlotte has made a case for itself as an open, inclusive city. I think it will be manifest at the next election that [Martin's] opinion is in the minority."
Steve Umberger, Charlotte Repertory's founder and artistic director, says he doesn't expect the commission's move to take a significant toll on the theater's funding or to affect scheduling choices. "Charlotte has grown a lot in the past ten years," he says. "It's in the process of going from being a town to a city. But it is still a conservative town in the Bible Belt. There are those who fear that to allow homosexual content in plays is equivalent to promoting it. That's the distinction that has to be made. It isn't promoting it."
Asked about Allen's decision to keep Rent out of Charlotte, Gray says, "I think that's a bad call, but that's her right. Unfortunately, it forms part of the same picture. Have you ever had a photograph taken of you that you didn't like? That's analogous to what's happening here."
Producer John Ballard, who will present Rent in Salt Lake City, had an altogether different experience with Angels in America. He passed on presenting Angels during its national tour, reasoning that the play contains material that might easily have offended Salt Lake City's large Mormon population. Yet when a local company mounted a Salt Lake City production, Angels was a hit.
Anticipating similar box-office success with Rent, Ballard has booked the show for two weeks in November 1998, double the performance run of most shows in his subscription series. "We have to be sensitive to the values of our members who are members of the church," he says, "so we will have a disclaimer and we'll also offer refunds in advance. But half the population of 1.3 million in Salt Lake City isn't Mormon, so that's 600,000 people who aren't going to have a problem."
Regardless of the uproar in Charlotte, Seller says he's caught no flak from his regional clients about Rent. "We've booked it through 1997 and 1998," he says, "and we're booking it in every city you can imagine, from Atlanta to Salt Lake City, Buffalo [N.Y.], Rochester [N.Y.], Toronto, Chicago, and Columbus [Ohio]. We're talking to Dayton [Ohio] now, and we expect to play Nashville. The truth is, Rent is such a phenomenon that we're playing longer runs in most of these markets than most musicals do. A normal show would go to Boston for four weeks, six weeks tops, and we're getting ready to end a 29-week run, where we'll have sold close to $15 million in tickets."
Seller points out that the Charlotte controversy over Angels involves public funds, while Rent will generate income solely through ticket sales. He also vows that some of those paying customers will be in Charlotte. "I think Judith will be doing her subscribers a disservice if she doesn't book the hottest musical on Broadway," says Seller. "And I can say unequivocally that Rent will play Charlotte, even if I have to present it myself."
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| Title Annotation: | political issues of the Broadway musical 'Rent' |
|---|---|
| Author: | Isherwood, Charles |
| Publication: | The Advocate (The national gay & lesbian newsmagazine) |
| Date: | May 27, 1997 |
| Words: | 1257 |
| Previous Article: | Marriage compromised. |
| Next Article: | Trailer trash. |
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