![]() The plot – like many of the songs themselves – has a tendency to lurch and splutter just as one idea gets going, Larson drops it and takes up another. Australia’s cities, enduring rental crises of their own, should take note. They decide, in the title song, that they’ll simply refuse to pay, and organise a protest movement against landlords, cops and gentrification itself. ![]() They begrudgingly endure power outages, freezing living conditions and, as something they probably should have seen coming, demands to pay last year’s rent. Mark (Noah Mullins) lives with his friend Roger (Jerrod Smith) in a dilapidated hovel in the Lower East Side district of New York known as Alphabet City. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Characters often seem like mere ciphers, their actions servicing Larson’s dramatic whims but rarely making psychological sense. ![]() Thus we get a jumble of underdeveloped stories revolving around hot-button issues including homelessness, drug addiction and the Aids crisis. Larson chucks everything at it with undergraduate enthusiasm but little sense of precision. ![]() Rent is a fairly unsophisticated reframing of Puccini’s La Bohème, artlessly transposing the opera’s 1830s Parisian bohemians to the lower Manhattan of the mid-90s. View image in fullscreen ‘Martha Berhane throws her whole self into the role of Mimi, although the book asks her to do some stupid things for love.’ Photograph: Pia Johnson ![]()
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