Rent Live

[LaffingBear]

Anyone else tune in for Rent Live on Fox Jan 27?

 

Except, it mostly wasn't live, because Roger broke his foot during dress rehearsal Saturday. So Fox aired the dress rehearsal, which had been taped. Only the final scene was live, showing Roger seated, leg elevated and wearing an orthopedic boot, as he sang the final love song to Mimi.

 

Overall, I thought it was a good performance. Thought there were a few misses, couldn't help wondering what they would have tweaked/corrected after dress rehearsal. I thought Jordan Fisher as Mark was fantastic. Got a chuckle when they held up the traditional Mark's sweater for a "oh no," decline in the scene where Angel buys Collins a coat. While I thought Tinashe as Mimi was good overall, I thought she was very pitchy in "Out Tonight." Enjoyed Keala Settle's contributions.

 

The concert-like screams of all the Rent-heads were distracting for me, as were cast members' interactions with the audience... like leaning off the stage to touch hands, like reality-TV talent competitions. A good portion of the lyrics were drowned out by audience screams. It wasn't promoted as "Rent - In Concert." Nice to see the original Rent cast members in the live encore.

 

Overall, as a fan of Rent, I thought it was worth watching. And my follow-ups will be to take note of Jordan Fisher, and to see if Keala Settle has released any music.

[+ WilliamM]

The South Pacific Concert DVD was somewhat different from the live performance with Reba and Brian Stocks Mitchell at Carnegie. They also used scenes from the dress rehearsal.

[+ Gar1eth]

I saw a current picture of Anthony Rapp. He looks like he has facial wasting. Of course it could be genetics or due to cosmetic surgery.

 

Gman

[bostonman]

The South Pacific Concert DVD was somewhat different from the live performance with Reba and Brian Stocks Mitchell at Carnegie. They also used scenes from the dress rehearsal.

 

Yes, it's pretty common to have dress rehearsal footage as backup. (And for many years, before the HD transmissions, the "live" Met TV broadcasts were often a potential combination of several tapings in-house.) But in this case (Rent, that is), it felt like many of the actors were underplaying at the rehearsal, with the result that the portion of the broadcast I watched seemed pretty unsatisfying. I DVR'd this to watch at some point in the near future - last night I just saw a bit of it. But what I saw/heard seemed pretty lame.

[edjames]

Disappointing reviews! Shame...

 

‘Rent Live’ Review: How Do You Measure a Show You Were Never Meant to See?

A longstanding superstition holds that saying the title of William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” while inside a theater — unless you are rehearsing or performing the play itself — will bring about a terrible curse.

The notion is based on an unfounded legend, but it makes you wonder what people were saying in the studio where “Rent: Live” was rehearsing the past few weeks. On Sunday, not long before the 8 p.m. curtain for the musical’s live broadcast on Fox, the network announced that Brennin Hunt, the actor playing Roger, seriously injured his footwhile performing during the previous day’s dress rehearsal. Unlike on Broadway (and in most professional theater productions), the show did not have understudies for its leads.

The solution? Much of what viewers would see would be Saturday’s recorded performance, the cast noted in a statement during an early commercial break. The final 15 minutes or so were live; Hunt was at a table, his foot in a cast and propped on a chair. (Hashtags like #RentNotLive and #RentKindaLive trended during the broadcast.)

It feels a bit weird to critique what was almost entirely a recorded dress rehearsal. How do you measure three hours of chaotic visuals and middling audio most of us were never meant to see and hear? Mostly in disappointment, I guess, though this is what Fox gave us.

“Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s musical about a ragtag bunch of young squatters who self-righteously equate their refusal to pay their landlord to sticking it to The Man, debuted at New York Theater Workshop in 1996 and went on to become a Broadway juggernaut. But it’s a curious choice for a major network production.

It’s not family friendly in the way that “The Sound of Music” or “The Wiz” are, or “Grease” sort of is. It’s a show so of its time (garage rock filtered through a Broadway sensibility!) that it can be easy to play down the impact it had as a daring, wildly progressive musical prominently featuring characters of color, queer romance and people living with (and dying from) AIDS, at a time when the disease and its victims were rarely front and center in pop culture.

Few moments from “Rent: Live” evoked what made the show so special. The sound mixing was rough — characters’ voices were sometimes too soft, too loud or just too muddled to comprehend. It didn’t help that the overzealous crowd, perhaps primed from years of “American Idol” and the like, chimed in to “woo” and cheer whenever an actor belted a long note — which, if you aren’t familiar with “Rent,” occurs a lot. In the case of “Today 4 U,” a musical showcase for the larger-than-life optimist Angel (Valentina, a star of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”), the audience was so hyped it drowned out much of her vocals.

Also too muddled to comprehend: the frantic, overwrought camerawork. “Rent: Live” was directed by Michael Greif, who oversaw the original Broadway production, and Alex Rudzinski, but they both seemed to be channeling Baz Luhrmann. The cameras swooped around the sprawling stage erratically, without any ostensible purpose other than to distinguish this from feeling like a theater production. During “

,” a simple melody sung by the chorus in a round, the focus shifted dizzily from one character to another, effectively dulling the moment’s emotional resonance.

As with network TV’s other recent live musicals, the cast was a mix of stage and screen performers, along with a couple of pop stars. The results were all over the place: The R&B singers Tinashe and Mario,

playing Mimi and Benny, did fine, but they weren’t standouts. Jordan Fisher’s Mark was lithe and fun to watch while dancing, particularly during “La Vie Boheme.”

The highlights included Vanessa Hudgens as the flighty performance artist and activist Maureen and Kiersey Clemons as her uptight lawyer girlfriend, Joanne, performing “

.” It’s a fun duet brimming with flirtations and frustrations, a favorite song of countless high school theater nerds (like me) and karaoke enthusiasts — and Hudgens and Clemons nailed it in the dress rehearsal, convincingly playing the feverish couple at a crossroads while hitting those notes.

As Collins, the Broadway actor Brandon Victor Dixon (who played Judas in last spring’s live TV broadcast of “Jesus Christ Superstar”) also gave a towering performance during the number “I’ll Cover You (Reprise).” He brought soul and the pangs of grief and loss into every lyric, and when the chorus joined in, it was haunting.

Around 10:45 p.m., the would-be live show finally became live. Unfortunately, the last few songs of “Rent” are some of the musical’s most unremarkable, as the story hurtles awkwardly toward its jarring ending.

Yet in those moments, as the characters comforted one another during the final song and cast members from the original Broadway production, including Idina Menzel, Taye Diggs and Anthony Rapp, appeared onstage for “Seasons of Love,” I regretted that these hard-working performers didn’t get to put on the show that they had signed up for (even if the fully live “Rent” probably would have suffered from the same maddening camera whiplash and bad sound).

Yes, it was disappointing. But clearly there was love in this production, too.

[edjames]

NYPost was no kinder...

What failed ‘Rent: Live’ should teach TV: Cast Broadway talent

By Robert Rorke

January 28, 2019 | 12:13pm

 

Fox’s not-so-live broadcast of “Rent” Sunday night made a good case for calling it quits when it comes to the age of the live television musical.

Nielsen reports that just 3.42 million viewers tuned in, making “Rent” the least-watched of all the networks’ live musicals.

In depressing contrast to NBC’s triumphant, Emmy-winning production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” last year, this non-event proved that if you’re going to do a Broadway show, you should cast it with Broadway names.

We had Brennin Hunt from “The X Factor” in the lead role of Roger and Valentina from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” handling the tricky role of Angel. It was obvious from her first number that she could not sing and was already out of breath. Hunt — who broke his foot during Saturday’s dress rehearsal, necessitating the use of a film of Saturday night’s dress rehearsal in place of a truly live production, except for a bit of Act 2 — sounded more hoarse as the show went on.

Fox’s idea of a musical is “American Idol” and the network filled the studio with a multitude of cheering fans who gave each number an apoplectic reception, even when the singers were off-key or overshadowed by the band. But you know how things go in LA: Everyone’s a genius. Maybe Fox should have had Ryan Seacrest come on at the end of each number to instruct the audience to vote for their favorites via an 800 number.

But surely some things were good, right? Vanessa Hudgens and Kiersey Clemons (kinda screechy) had a great number, “Take Me or Leave Me,” that was staged on a bed. The reliable Brandon Victor Dixon delivered a powerfully emotional “I’ll Cover You.” Best of all, the original cast assembled at the finale to deliver their version — the only version — of playwright Jonathan Larson’s signature song, “Seasons of Love.” Seeing familiar faces such as Taye Diggs, Jesse L. Martin and Idina Menzel up there threw the bloated three hours that went before into stark relief. They were the real thing. The rest of “Rent” was mostly like amateur hour.

 

“The Sound of Music Live” generated a lot of headlines when NBC ambitiously staged the musical at the Grumman Studios in Bethpage, Long Island, in 2013 — particularly for its controversial casting of Carrie Underwood in Julie Andrews’ role and for its phenomenal rating, some 18 million viewers. Because repetition is the name of the game in TV, the musicals continued to come. We had “Peter Pan” and when people complained that the musical choices were dated, “Grease” and “Hairspray.”

Not one of these has equaled the popularity of “The Sound of Music” and results have been uneven, with publicity stunts such as casting complete unknowns in lead roles or suspect casting (62-year-old Harvey Fierstein playing high school student Tracy Turnblad’s mother, not grandmother, in “Hairspray”).

 

 

The inadequacies of Fox’s production of “Rent” suggest that the heyday of the live TV musical is probably behind us. NBC wisely postponed its production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” for which likely star Jennifer Lopez is too old to play the lead role of Rosie (it was Janet Leigh in the 1963 movie and Chita Rivera on Broadway). A live TV production of “Hair” is scheduled for May 2019, but just contemplating how NBC will sanitize the onstage nudity seen in the Broadway production is enough to make one say, “Stop now.” Please.

[+ Gar1eth]

 

“The Sound of Music Live” generated a lot of headlines when NBC ambitiously staged the musical at the Grumman Studios in Bethpage, Long Island, in 2013 — particularly for its controversial casting of Carrie Underwood in Julie Andrews’ role and for its phenomenal rating, some 18 million viewers. Because repetition is the name of the game in TV, the musicals continued to come. We had “Peter Pan” and when people complained that the musical choices were dated, “Grease” and “Hairspray.”

Not one of these has equaled the popularity of “The Sound of Music” ....

 

Just for the record, I think I had really been looking forward to "The Sound of Music." IIRC, I ended up turning if off due to how bad Carrie Underwood was in the part.

 

Plus I was po'ed they didn't use the "Lonely Goatherd" from the movie. But maybe there would have been no way to hide professional marionette performers on a live show. But I love that song.

 

 

 

Gman

[+ WilliamM]

Just for the record, I think I had really been looking forward to "The Sound of Music." IIRC, I ended up turning if off due to how bad Carrie Underwood was in the part.

 

Plus I was po'ed they didn't use the "Lonely Goatherd" from the movie. But maybe there would have been no way to hide professional marionette performers on a live show. But I love that song.

 

 

 

Gman

 

Uh. The television The Sound of Music followed the Original Broadway script from 1959. I did see the TSOM on stage in 1960. To be fair, the film was better.

[+ Gar1eth]

Just for the record, I think I had really been looking forward to "The Sound of Music." IIRC, I ended up turning if off due to how bad Carrie Underwood was in the part.

 

Plus I was po'ed they didn't use the "Lonely Goatherd" from the movie. But maybe there would have been no way to hide professional marionette performers on a live show. But I love that song.

 

 

 

Gman

Uh. The television The Sound of Music followed the Original Broadway script from 1959.

 

I knew that.

 

Gman

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

It was just so terrible. The whole broadcast.

 

And that fucking audience screaming and clapping at everything, including Mimi's death.

[+ Gar1eth]

I hadn't planned on watching it due to it bringing back some bad memories. Now I guess I'm even gladder.

 

Gman

[bostonman]

Plus I was po'ed they didn't use the "Lonely Goatherd" from the movie. But maybe there would have been no way to hide professional marionette performers on a live show. But I love that song.

 

They most certainly did use the song. In the storm scene where Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote it to be. (For the film, "My Favorite Things" went to the storm scene - not nearly as effective - and "Goatherd" got relegated to that shoehorned marionette show moment - a place in the film I always find myself tuning out because it has no relevance to anything. The original point of "Goatherd" in the storm scene was that Maria was playing a game with the kids that if they sang LOUD enough, they could beat the storm's noise. Cues for the sounds of thunderclaps are actually written into the music.)

 

My problem with that production wasn't so much Carrie Underwood by herself (frankly, I thought she sang well enough) - it was the overall awkward stiffness that affected almost every member of the cast, perhaps save Audra McDonald. It had to have been the most boring and cardboard version of The Sound Of Music ever done. Absolutely joyless.