Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by Anthony Rapp, directed by Steve Maler
Menier Chocolate Factory, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
December 16, 2012-January 6, 2013
“Clinging to His Connection”
The second show of Mirvish Productions’ new Off-Mirvish season is Anthony Rapp’s Without You, direct from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival via a run at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory. If you think of yourself as a certified Rent-head, then Without You will be a slice of heaven. If, however, you have never seen the 1994 musical Rent by Jonathan Larson, or if you have seen it and don’t really believe, as Rapp does, that it changed the course of American musical theatre forever – viz. Mamma Mia! (1999), We Will Rock You (2002), The Lion King (1997), Mary Poppins (2004), etc. – you may find the air of self-importance that surrounds Rapp’s show hard to take. Anthony Rapp, 41, who is still best known as the creator of the role of videographer Mark Cohen in Rent, has fashioned a show about how he came to be part of Rent along with his personal and family life at the time that functions primarily as an 80-minute-long autobiographical footnote to Larson’s musical.
Rapp’s 2008 show is based on his 2006 book Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent. The show concerns the extremes of happiness and sadness that Rapp experienced between 1993 and 1997. In 1993 composer Larson chose him for the first workshop of Rent but dies suddenly at age 35 just before the first preview of Rent in 1994. At the same time Rapp was coping with the recurrence of cancer in his mother who died from the disease in 1997 at the age of 55. Enhancing Rapp’s experience was the musical which Larson wrote to commemorate the death from AIDS for so many young artists in New York City.
Rapp takes us through his first audition for Larson and director Michael Greif when he sang “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M. Rapp intersperses songs from Rent with his own songs inspired by the events of the time. This is a fairly daring move for someone who unquestioningly lionizes Larson, especially since Rapp’s songs are not as rich in melody, rhythm or lyrics as Larson’s are. Rapp’s mother said he sang like an angel when he was young, but now Rapp’s voice has lowered and grown husky and unremarkable. One of many odd aspects of the show is that there is nothing charismatic about Rapp’s delivery of his songs from Rent or of his own music. Indeed, after he sings “Losing My Religion”, with noticeably less intensity than Michael Stipe, it’s hard to see what could have motivated Larson and Greif to choose him. Rapp is not helped by sound engineering that makes him sound as if he were speaking and talking inside a lucite box. The sound engineer even allows Rapp’s five-member backing band to drown him out on occasion.
To tell his story Rapp takes on the voices of over a dozen people, including all of his family, Larson and Larson’s parents and many of the actors and creatives associated with Rent. The voices may be distinct, but very few of these impressions become real characters in the way that Rod Beattie achieves in his Wingfield plays or Melody A. Johnson does in Miss Caledonia. Two notable exceptions are Larson’s stoic father and Rapp’s mother, whose decline Rapp delineates in minute detail. Some may find Rapp’s imitation of his own dying mother touching. Some may find it morbid. At times the show feels like a private therapy assignment that Rapp is assigned to perform repeatedly until he has got it out of his system.
The most moving part of Rapp’s narrative is not his own story but one of his mother’s from her time as a nurse. She saw that a child suffering from cancer was fighting a hopeless fight to stay alive and told the child’s father that sometimes the dying need the permission of the living to die. If only the whole of Rapp’s show had the profound simplicity of that insight, it would be remarkable.
Unfortunately, performing in a musical about the people dying young and experiencing the death at a young age of the two people he admired most has strangely given Rapp no particular insight into coping with grief or death. Whenever Rapp has to summarize his point of view, he either recurs to lyrics in Larson’s musical or to phrases from grief counsellor Larson himself used to deal with the death of his friends. She unfortunately speaks in New Age platitudes – “you don’t work out but through” – that Rapp adopts without question and even includes in his songs.
When the show finishes with Rapp singing a reprise of Rent’s big hit “Seasons of Love”, you begin to wonder why 18 years after Rent opened, Rapp is still so stuck in the 1990s. Isn’t it time now to move on? Has he decided there will be no further high points in his life? Or does he think his association with the first production of this one musical is the only thing that makes him special? Rather than moving or emotional, I found Without You the rather depressing exercise of a man reaching middle age who is still rhapsodizing about when he hitched his wagon to a star – a star, however, that has already set.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Anthony Rapp. ©2012 Alastair Muir.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2012-12-18
Without You