A PREORDAINED NIGHT IN PROVIDENCE

Official RENT Blog contributor Tommy Collison traveled from Ireland to Providence, Rhode Island, to see RENT's original Mark and Roger, Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal.  Tommy tells us more about his experience attending the 2009 Broadway Tour.

November 21st, 8pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The young man with short, bleached-blonde hair ambles out on stage, a Fender guitar swung over his shoulder. Nonchalantly, he begins tuning the guitar. These actions, though seeming innocuous, are underscored by huge applause from the audience.

Not long after, a bespectacled man with reddish-blond hair bounds onstage, sporting a striped scarf and cradling a 16 mm Bolex video-camera like a newborn baby. Behind these two unlikely protagonists, the twenty-something-strong company files onstage.

RENT has begun.

Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp returned in 2009 on a National Tour of the show that made them famous. I was lucky enough to make it over to Providence, Rhode Island in November 2009 to see the show.

What can I say?

The show was an absolute joy, as was to be expected. Rapp and Pascal (Rascal) originated their respective roles, so seeing the original interpretations of the characters we hold so dear was magical. I’m all for new actors carrying the torch and giving new life to these characters, but there’s something to be said for the people who were part of the original 1996 company. What you’re seeing is largely what the people who went in 1996 saw, and there’s something undeniably exhilarating about that. I saw a part of musical theatre history that night.

The Providence Performing Arts Center has almost three times the capacity of the Nederlander (3,100 seats versus 1,232), but I was happy that none of the intimacy, urgency, nor rawness of the show was lost.

At the end of the night, the feeling that I felt was one of overwhelming relief and happiness that I got to see this tour before it closed. I got to meet Anthony Rapp and tell him personally how much his work (both theatric and written) has influenced and affected me, and to thank him for that.

(Yes, that’s a Mark scarf I’m sporting. My mother is great.)

Tommy

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