Rent

On Saturday evening Kelsey, Barratt, Tori and I went to see Footlight Club's production of Rent, in which John performed.

We began the evening at an Indian restaurant in Jamaica Plain. I would describe the food as pleasant, but not as pleasant as the company. The vindaloo was delicious, and the korma also very good, though both perhaps on the mild side (we ordered medium), while the fish curry had interesting flavours but was a little unbalanced (Barratt suggested too much garlic). I enjoy Indian food, but I don't notice a great deal of difference between different places, and this did seem like more of the same.

The theatre is a relatively old building: in fact it claims to be America's oldest community theatre. The audience was packed, and it felt a little odd to be tucked off to the side towards the back, since I'm used to small MIT productions seating 150 at most. My space was slightly cramped, which would have fine had I not hurt my leg a week prior after falling off my bicycle.

The set was somewhat similar to some of MITGSP's sets in structure, but very difference in appearance. There was a platform I want to call 8 feet tall (the tower of London in our current production is 8 feet tall, and I think this is a MITGSP standard - I don't know whether it's a theatrical standard but I guess it's convenient in that anyone can walk under it) covering a large part of centre upstage and a lower platform downstage left, while the rest of the stage was mostly flat apart from a bizarre raised strip under the proscenium (we later learned that it housed footlights).

I was struck by how consistently strong the performers were. I'm used to student productions, which often have a few excellent performers and some who aren't quite as good, but this cast was uniformly very good. Perhaps Joshua Rajman as Roger was the pick of the bunch, but it could only have been by a small margin. Jose Romero was obviously cast particularly for his dancing, which was brilliant.

I particularly liked the immediacy with which I felt a character walk onto the stage, rather than an actor. I felt like the show reduced the suspension of disbelief to more like the level found in a TV show or movie, rather than that of a stage production. Perhaps the modern American setting had something to do with that, but I think it in large part came from the actors' ability to carry themselves in their characters (and from Lisa Mosher, the costume designer, who did such an effective job that most of the time it felt like it wasn't a job at all, and the characters had simply put on clothes from their wardrobe). Mark (Todd Sandstrom) and Benny (Matthew Ford) were particularly notable.

One slight disappointment I had with the acting was a lack of chemistry between the couples. The characters felt real enough that I would have liked a more natural dynamic. Collins (Rish Basu) and Angel in the second act, and Maureen (Anne Olmsted) and Joanne (Shira Cahn-Lipman) during the La Vie Boheme sequence, hit what I was looking for, but on average it wasn't quite there.

The musical aspect of the show felt amazingly solid. It really felt like the cast and band made up one performing unit, not multiple individual performers. Shawn Gelzleichter, the music director, must have been doing an excellent job keeping everyone in time, especially from his concealed position beneath the aforementioned platform.

Unfortunately a couple of the technical theatre aspects weren't up to the standard of what was onstage. The sound engineering carried the musical pattern just fine, but it was very hard to make out the words a high proportion of the time. Barratt's suggestion was that it came about because the balance wasn't sound checked after actors were wearing their microphones, since small variations in placement make a big difference. I did notice the problems more in act two, after most people had changed costumes, so that could well be right. Perhaps the actors needed to work on their diction like we need to in MITGSP!

The lighting didn't really do well when anything exotic was tried. Much of the time a large portion of the stage was somewhat brightly lit, which I think is a reasonable fallback position if one is having trouble with anything more specific. There were some follow spots behind us, which were used occasionally to accent the main characters onstage but would have been distracting had they been used any more. At one unfortunate moment, a dancer on the upper level managed to keep her head exactly in a shadow cast by the ordinary lighting fixtures of the hall - that shadow being roughly the same size as her head, so she had placed herself so precisely one would have had to think it was deliberate had it not looked so obviously wrong.

Overall, the strongest impression was of enjoyable music pleasantly presented. Perhaps the writers of the show wanted it to make political or social observations, but I was more interested in a nice evening listening to some very good singers.