Rent gets new lease, and is more timely than ever

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This article was published 27/06/2023 (1200 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Allen MacInnis retired in 2021 after 20 years as artistic director of Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre, the career change came with an asterisk.

“I hit 65 and I thought, ‘It’s time to let someone else have this great job,’” recalls MacInnis, who was at the creative helm of Prairie Theatre Exchange for eight years, spanning the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. “I told people I didn’t intend to work anymore unless an opportunity came up that I really wanted to do, or could bring something specific to.”

Then came a phone call from Rainbow Stage artistic director Carson Nattrass: would MacInnis be willing to come back to Winnipeg to direct Rent, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning smash, one of the most acclaimed works of musical theatre of the last half-century?

Yes, of course.

MacInnis, now 67, had never seen the show live. “I couldn’t have gotten a ticket to save my life because it was sold out all the time,” he says. However, he remembered when Rent arrived on the scene, creating a Broadway sensation, provoking intense conversation. It made its creator, Jonathan Larson, a legend.

The show, a modern retelling of Puccini’s La Bohème, was grounded in Larson’s own community of “starving artists.” With forward-looking boldness and a defiantly humorous bravado, it explored themes such as AIDS, gender identity and sexuality under the auspices of a rock opera.

Its first reading occurred in 1993, and it made its off-Broadway debut on Jan. 26, 1996, one day after Larson died unexpectedly from an aortic dissection at age 35.

Rent went on to become one of the longest-running Broadway musicals in history, adapted in 2005 into a feature film starring several original cast members, including Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal and Idina Menzel.

To prepare for her audition as Joanne Jefferson, 29-year-old Boma Cookey-Gam watched the movie for the first time since she was a pre-teen.

The second time around, it hit differently. “When I first saw it, I thought, ‘This is cool, this is dope,’ but now I can connect with it in a completely different way.’”

Born in Obopo, Nigeria, Cookey-Gam is making her Rainbow Stage debut and taking on her first major stage role at the same time. An economics and management grad from the University of Manitoba, she got some first-hand experience in labour instability when the pandemic led to her layoff from a midsize insurance firm.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, I got a chance to reflect and reset, and to figure out what I wanted to do,” she says. “I took the leap.”

Most recently, Cookey-Gam has been cast in television shows such as the locally shot The Spencer Sisters and a Hallmark movie called A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe.

This production of Rent is the second in Rainbow Stage’s history. It ran for the first time in 2010, just after the rights became available. Nattrass says that this version features a nearly entirely local cast and what he calls a “brand-new take” on the beloved musical.

“We’re revisiting it from the inside out,” he says. “It’s hard for me to explain, but if you feel like you haven’t seen Rent before, you are going to see one of the best productions you can see. And if you have seen it, you’re going to feel like you’re seeing it for the first time ever.”

With somewhat mature subject matter, Nattrass says the show was a bit of a departure from the standard Rainbow Stage fare when it played here in 2010.

“I would say in 2010, it felt risky, but in 2023, it feels relevant in that our culture has moved forward in so many ways,” he says.

“I think when it premièred, Rent was fairly radical,” says MacInnis. “It’s not necessarily about advocacy, but it was putting (the lives of people with AIDS) on stage, and therefore humanizing it.”

The show still matters, MacInnis says, in large part because the impacts of the AIDS crisis are still being felt around the world, and younger generations might not understand the significance of the trauma and stigma it caused.

Simply going out in public provoked panic. He recalls dining out with his husband and a friend who was visibly sick with AIDS. “The restaurant just froze,” he says. “The pressure was unbelievable, but he was determined to stay and have our meal.”

“This show matters because it’s important to recognize that we have to find ways to survive crisis,” says MacInnis. “Among us will be those who really struggle and fall apart, and there are others who have to come in and help make it possible to survive whatever kind of extreme threat there is. That, to me, is a major message of the show: that together, we can find the way through extreme trauma.”

In the wake of a different, still-unfolding pandemic, that’s a notion to which we can all relate.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com