I first saw rent in my high school to support my acting friends and did not fully understand the message of the musical. Upon seeing it again, I realized that beyond its catchy music, there is an important message. The musical follows a group of friends that each struggle with their own personal vice, addition, sexual identity, parental problems, financial problems, or materialism, however they all hope to leave a meaningful legacy. Yet their vices lead to their goal. Through the struggle, they all endure hope, and doubt, and debt, but with it comes their unification and realization that their friends are their family.

Rent has had the ability thus far to stand over the test of time. Its messages about addiction, AIDS, and the day to day struggle of just trying to make it resonate even today. Watching the musical made me realize how important it is to show all sides of life even the darker sides.

The movie Rent taught me something i had never though off the fact that even though we hear about how dangerous a drug addict’s life can be or life with AIDS we never truly understand their lives until we get a close up depicted of it which I feel I strongly got through this musical and it made their life experiences very vivid. In fact, not having really watched a musical ever in my life really made this film stand out to me as it showed how music can be a powerful art form to convey meaning.

I am a big fan of musicals and RENT has one of my favorite soundtracks because of its edgy rock sound. I was really excited to see it was playing in Rose since last year we never really saw any of these types of movies.

I know the show by heart, I’ve seen the movie and live productions of it, so when it started playing and I didn’t recognize it at first, I was confused for a good minute there. Then, Reneé Elise Goldsberry’s protrayal of Mimi lit up the screen and I knew that I was watching RENT: Live from Broadway. After enjoying the film, I came to the conclusion that this was my favorite version of the musical. The actors really give a lot of heart to these characters and make it so you’re enthralled by them and their stories, which is important when you’re talking about topics such as AIDS and discrimination.

All throughout the film, I kept singing the songs because they’re some of my favorites so I think I made a good choice by sitting in the back of the dining hall so as to not bother anyone. I’m only slightly disappointed we didn’t see the second act, it is the most heartfelt and emotional half of the show, although I get why it wasn’t shown, it would’ve made the night a lot longer.

The movie of a live performance of the Broadway show Rent was a moving betrayal of life in Alphabet City in 1980’s New York City.  With a backdrop of drug use, poverty, and HIV, the story revolved around the ups and downs in relationships between a group of 20 something characters.  The characters sung every word of the dialogue.  This definitely is not my go to genre.  However, the story was strong, and the acting was exceptional.  I was able to really feel the emotions characters were trying to convey.  The viewer experienced an emotional roller-coaster that went from the feeling of true love to the feeling of complete despair.  I am mostly into action movies so this was definitely way outside my comfort zone.  But I am glad I tried something different and watched Rent.

Dr. Thet Howe’s presentation and her three short films about a recent movement in Myanmar was quite inspiring. From it I learned of several intertwined projects committed to empowering women and teaching sexual health and awareness to women in Yangon, Myanmar. Their approach has been multi-pronged, in that they give women tools for developing their confidence, from self-defense lessons, to handing out whistles to deter harassers in public.

This whistle campaign was especially interesting to me, because it not only protects women from harassment, but sets the social standard that harassment should not be tolerated. This project opens up dialogue that has long been silently affecting women for generations. Buses may seem like a small facet of a bigger problem, but I think it is actually really impactful to start there, because many women have no choice but to spend a significant part of their day commuting to work or school. Public transportation is not big in the United States, but in places were it is common, public harassment tends to come along with it. I personally remember seeing signs in Japanese train stations warning people of harassers.

The second video, about the struggles of women of religious minorities, was quite sad. In Myanmar, Muslim women and Christian nuns experience lots of judgement and condescendence directed towards them. Parts of the video were emotional as they recounted some of these personal experiences. Several echoed that women are treated like second class citizens. Women are encouraged to stay quiet and accept their limitations imposed on them regarding what they can’t say and can’t do.

The societal limitations placed against women in Myanmar, especially religious ones, reminds me of the the book A Room to One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Woolf talked about all of the extra hoops women have to jump through in order to pursue their dreams that do not align with their perceived domestic role in society. These barriers have to be removed before equal opportunity can be achieved. For the most part in developed countries, women on a relatively equal standing to men. Personally I feel like my gender has not limited my opportunities.

This made me realize how privileged I am to live in a place like the United States that strongly values equality. Even though inequality has and still persists, my belief is that our situation is far closer to being equal than in other countries. Myanmar, for instance, was under a military dictatorship until ten years or so ago, so social issues were largely unaddressed. Things are changing for Myanmar, however, and this does make me hopeful that developing countries have begun to pay attention to social issues so that all people have equal opportunity.

Book referenced: Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Bibliotech Press, 2018.

Tonight, we watched Rent, the musical. The musical itself touched on multiple topics, such as sexuality, the HIV/AIDs crisis, and drug usage. All of these themes were extremely prominent during the 80s in NY. It reminded me of my dad telling me about living in New York City in the 80s and how dangerous the streets were.

This made me think a lot about how quickly time passes, and how the worries of today might not even be relevant 30 years from now. For example, the poliovirus had a giant outbreak in New York in the early 1900s, but after the creation of its vaccine, it remained fairly quiet in the United States. However, it’s only been recent that the emergence of the anti-vaccination movement that polio has become a serious concern again.

On the other hand, due to the invention of AntiRetroViral Treatment and other insights, we know so much more about HIV/AIDS. We will likely never reach the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 80s. Unlike in Rent, there is a much greater understanding of what AIDS is especially with our younger generation. It’s interesting to think about what future college students will think about a musical based on our current time period entering the 2020s. What will they regard as “solved” that we regard as so threatening to our everyday wellbeing today?

It’s safe to say that there was a lot going on in Rent. From AIDs to poverty to freedom of speech, the characters of Rent sang their way through tough times with passion. Seeing the musical more than 20 years after it first premiered made the whole experience overwhelming. However, despite it being so, there’s a reason why the musical is famous. That is because it’s so revolutionary. Set in the 90s, Rent exposed the vulnerability of having AIDS, of being poor, and of having a different sexuality. But the show really puts these themes in the spotlight and made the audience sympathize with the characters and their hardships during the cold winter of New York City. The entire show itself was unconventional, which makes it unique and loved by our generation today.

        I don’t usually watch musicals — I really don’t. Call me boring, but I honestly always think there’s too much singing where there could be talking or some other form of communication. For Rent, though, I made an exception because of how much praise I had heard heaped upon it over the years (not to mention hearing “Seasons of Love” and admittedly finding it catchy). I did not know much about the specifics of the musical before seeing it in its 2005 film version this past weekend, but I quickly saw that it was a window into the lives of several fictional New Yorkers on Christmas Eve in 1989. Despite their separate lives, all of the characters have a relationship to each other in some way, whether they are roommates, friends, or lovers. All of them also share something in common: They have been unfortunately pushed to the fringes of society in some way, whether through poverty, through their sexuality, through addiction to drugs, or through an affliction with AIDS.

        As I expected, I didn’t initially love Rent — again, because of my personal distaste for musicals in general. I also wondered if this was really the best medium to be talking about the themes that were so prevalent in its plot. Shouldn’t the characters be having more conversations about what was going on in their lives rather than dancing around? And do Mark and his mother really need to half-talk, half-sing to each other about their Christmas plans over the phone? At first my answer was a resounding “no,” but I later took a step back and reconsidered. How many people were having regular conversations about struggling with AIDS, addiction, sexuality, or poverty — let alone musical ones — when Rent first premiered 1996? Although I can’t give exact numbers, I can be certain that there was less talk about these pressing issues in that time than there are in 2019. As I  thought more about the musical, I also began to appreciate the risk that Jonathan Larson took in creating it– I doubt that he knew how others would receive Rent as he was writing it. Perhaps they would not respond well to its messages or to its characters, and perhaps the musical would have completely flopped. I think that song and dance take some of the seriousness away from the darker issues in Rent to make them more accessible, while also suggesting that no matter what one might be going through, there is hope and there are other people going through similar struggles. And perhaps those people aren’t even total strangers, but are in fact just friends of a friend.

        I can’t lie and pretend that I’m going to start watching more musicals because of Rent. I can say, though, that I will take its concept with me as I go forward in life — that sometimes, portraying serious ideas in an unconventional way, even with some element of fun, can help get those ideas across more effectively.