Bohemia is dead.
So says the supposedly evil corporate climber type.
Perhaps being the only man in the theatre should have told me something. Maybe I should have sympathized less with the supposedly evil guy quoted above and more with the ragtag collection of drug addicts and squatters offered as the heroes. I do believe Bohemia’s dead. In fact, I think Bohemia is a myth. Not in the “conspiracy of cartographers” sense but as an imagined golden age where truth and beauty and those who sought them were celebrated.
Bollocks. Never happened. Everyone has to make a living. Leonardo turned out unfinished works by the hundreds for the folks that paid his bills. Michelangelo worked for four years to complete his Sistine Chapel commission.
My brother thought the movie – and by extension the show – seemed dated. I think it did but didn’t have to. I think that the artists who created the show and movie want it to be a rallying cry for the present rather than an excellently crafted portrait of the past.
As a history lesson Rent is great. I burst into laughter when I saw the storefront for “Nobody beats the Wiz.” Man, I remember that from my childhood. But I also remember going to New York for the first time to see the Radio City Christmas show in the show’s time period. I remember the graffitti, the bums, the stolen watches and pirated movies being sold on cardboard tables in Times Square. I remembered it so well, in fact, that I didn’t go back to New York for almost fifteen years: in a large group, with guns.
As a requiem for a lost past Rent doesn’t work as well. There may be honor in poverty. There may be solidarity in starvation. But New York is now a fine place to spend time. If the cost of that improvement was the loss of housing for wistful dreamers and starving artists, so be it. After all, nobody but glassy-eyed utopians “. . . really want a neighborhood where people piss on your stoop every night[.]”