SOURCE: "Victim Kitsch," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 278, No. 3, September, 1996, pp. 98-100, 102-104, 106.

[Below, Davis argues that Rent is not the solution to Broadway's problems.]

As everyone has surely heard by now, Jonathan Larson's Rent—the seventh musical ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama and the first to do so in advance of its premiere on Broadway—is a rock musical in the tradition of Hair but with even grander pretensions to opera, "sung through" by an energetic young cast that plays East Village versions of the artists and paupers in Puccini's La Bohème. The painter Marcello and the poet Rodolfo have been transformed into Mark, a documentary filmmaker, and his roommate Roger, a rock singer and songwriter and a former junkie. Their friend Tom Collins, a computer whiz fired from MIT and now homeless, is based on Puccini's philosopher, Colline. Musetta, Marcello's former lover...