Review: New Village Arts’ scaled-down ‘Rent’ delivers a more personal story

Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 musical “Rent” has had its share of runs in San Diego over the past 30 years, including multiple national tours and a dozen or more locally staged productions.

I’ve seen it performed many times, including a handful with up to 24 actors and a live rock orchestra in the 3,000-seat San Diego Civic Theatre.

Now it’s back in a new production at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad. Produced in the company’s intimate 100-seat space, it feature a cast of 14 actors performing to recorded music.

Directed by Kym Pappas with music direction by Elena Correia and choreography by Tamara Rodriguez, New Village’s scaled-down “Rent” is no less emotionally moving. In fact, having the audience seated so close to the actors, some of the sung lines are easier to understand and the joy and suffering the actors transmit from such a close perspective makes their feelings more palpable.

“Rent” is loosely based upon Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera “La Boheme,” about a group of starving artists in early 19th-century Paris. Larson borrowed many of the characters, key scenes and a couple of musical phrases from “La Boheme,” but re-set the story in 1990s New York. The poet Rodolfo becomes recovering drug addict Roger, an HIV-positive rock musician whose girlfriend has died. The shy, sickly seamstress Mimi becomes the HIV-positive junkie Mimi who dances at a strip club to support her drug habit. They fall in love not when Mimi drops a key in Rodolfo’s apartment, but when the contemporary Mimi drops a bag of heroin.

Rodolfo’s painter friend Marcello becomes Mark, a lonely documentary filmmaker whose performance-artist girlfriend, Maureen (the singer Musetta in “La Boheme”), has dumped him for a lesbian lover, Joanne. And the men’s platonic roommates in “La Boheme,” Colline and Shaunard, become gay lovers Tom Collins, an HIV-positive philosophy professor, and Angel Schunard, a drag queen/street drummer dying of AIDS. In “Rent,” these artists are struggling to pay their rent in New York’s East Village and are facing homelessness when their landlord, Benny, decides to turn the apartment building into a cyber-arts complex.

Some of the situations and dialogue in “Rent” have not worn well with age, but Larson’s wonderful score is timeless, and the cast in this production are all good singers and actors.

Josh Bradford is a vocal standout as the tortured, commitment-shy Roger and Lena Ceja is a fiery, charismatic singer-dancer-actor as Mimi. Brennan Winspear finds the humor and heart in Mark, if not so much the painful loneliness. Van Angelo’s emotions are deep and raw as Tom and Xavier J. Bush is luminous as the withering Angel. Shannon McCarthy brings out the kooky side of Maureen, Eboni Muse is dignified and restrained as the ever-patient Joanne, and Juwan Stanford is conflicted as Benny.

The action takes place on a multilevel New York city set designed by Chritopher Scott Murillo, with costumes by Jessica Moreno Caycho, sound by Jordan Gray, lighting by Curtis Mueller and video by Jonah Gercke.

New Village’s “Rent” may be smaller in size than past productions, but it’s no less powerful in delivering its live-in-the-moment, “no day but today” message.

‘Rent’

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Dec. 24

Where: New Village Arts, 2787 State St., Carlsbad

Tickets: 760-433-3245

Online: newvillagearts.org