The Real Review

Honestly, if I were a producer of musicals I’d ban theatre critics. They are a stick in the mud crowd who might have fun elsewhere, but the minute you seat them in an auditorium with a proscenium arch and a three-hour running time, they suddenly have expectations. One really struggles to explain to them how entertaining The Full Monty is, but let’s try.

The characters are cardboard cutouts, they cry. But it’s a musical, dear. They go on and on that no matter how much dripping sentimental schlock you add, it doesn’t create depth of character. But it’s a musical, silly. They find the dialogue riddled with clichés, old jokes, unexamined attitudes and empty phrases. But they are snobs. They complain that every aspect of the plot is predictable after the first twenty minutes. But it’s a musical and everyone has seen the film anyway, stupid.

As for the film, they maintain it was charming; it had something to say about the way society constructs sexual roles in a particular class. The musical though, they tut-tut, has taken a perfectly good British movie and cut it off at the roots, then applied a commercial formula, diminished all content and inflated it with mawkish, redundant songs. This is the worst form of Americanization. Why do we import such mediocrity? Because they invented musicals and have a factory making them.

As for the story, the critics say it’s a big fuss about a group of regular joes who manage to lure a near hysterical audience by the childish promise of dropping their pants and showing the world their weenies, something that comes naturally to central Europeans wherever the sun shines and nobody blinks an eye.

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We are into the second decade of the reign (some might protest tyranny) of the musical. Musicals have swept most other kinds of theatre off the boards. There has never been as great a variety – from stage adaptations of films like Oprah Winfrey’s The Color Purple to new agitprop pieces going by such jingles as Failed States. The decision then to stage Rent here and now is surprising, especially after the 2005 film adaptation failed spectacularly.

A reworking of La Bohème, it is set in 1990s New York on the eve of Mayor Giuliani’s big clean up that saw the iconic gay Marlboro poster felled and most of my artist friends empty out of the Village to take the A-train north.

Rent is a big hit, even picking up a Pulitzer, and running for 10 years in the city it is so specific to. The local production’s production values are respectable and compare favourably. But Rent rode to fame on the emotions of the time, gay liberation and resistance to the blinkered response of the Reagan administration to AIDS in the 1980s – a plague that blighted the community as TB did for Puccini’s Europe.

The thin storyline revolves around a group of friends in their Alphabet City garret as they deal with having AIDS (they are not just HIV positive). Prostitution, needle drug usage and no holds barred sex clubs are part of their liberal lifestyle.

Given the radically different nature of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, and the brutal reality we are facing, out of the innumerable musicals available Rent is a thoughtless choice.

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