Rent (musical) Critical Essay | Rent

Critical Review by Ed Siegel

SOURCE: "Rent Has a Lease on Energy," in The Boston Globe, November 19, 1996, p. D1.

[In the following review, Siegel analyzes Rent's blend of show tunes and rock music.]

There is one characteristic of rock music that it alone possesses. It's the jolt at the beginning of a song, from Chuck Berry's "Reelin' and Rockin'" to Cracker's "Teen Angst" that shoots the audience onto the dance floor, or at least into the middle of the living room playing air guitar. It's as if the electric instruments have created a musical energy field.

Show music has its own form of up-tempo energy, consisting of hummable tunes that get your toes tapping while you're in the theater and that you can't get out of your head for days afterward. The great accomplishment of Jonathan Larson's Rent is that it is successful in melding those two musical idioms. Rock fans find something...
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