formative years and experiences

I love musicals.  I do.  It's cliché, but who cares.

"No Day But Today!"

Certain musicals had a very large part in my adolescent development, namely Rent.  I recently watched the DVD of the final performance of the show on Broadway after a 12-year run.  If you don't know about this show, it's a re-telling of Puccini's opera La Boheme set in the mid-1990's East Village of New York City.  It's a rock musical about bohemians-- starving artists, wayward academics, homeless people, and drug addicts, many dealing with HIV/AIDS.  It was very controversial in the beginning, and opened on Broadway with a very unique, new type of audience.  Rent is by Jonathan Larson, a composer/author who struggled for many years to find his niche in the American musical theatre community.  He struggled for many years working at a 'greasy spoon' diner while passionately pursuing his musical aspirations.  In a tragic turn of events, Jonathan died of an aortic aneurysm the day before Rent opened off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop.  The show went on to tremendous success at NYTW, and was quickly moved to Broadway where it won several Tony's and earned Larson a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

I remember vividly sitting on the floor of my living room while nobody was home and listening to the original cast album of Rent in 1996.  I was dealing with many things at that time-- who I was, what I was about, and struggling hard to find self-acceptance.  Rent was ground-breaking for me.  It was a celebration of people who are outside the mainstream and a joyous declaration that a "deviant" counterculture is a healthy thing for society.  Coming from small-town Midwest, these were earth-shattering ideals.  To hear a love duet between a gay man and a drag queen, stories about living on the street and drug users, and songs about an HIV/AIDS support group were completely outside my scope of understanding.  It made me realize I wasn't alone-- that there were people out there that felt different like me and who weren't afraid to celebrate being different.

I remember vividly hearing the sister of one of my good high school friends sing the song "Halloween" from Rent for an audition at the community theatre where I spent many a summer.  This girl, Anna, very much lived the ideals of Jonathan Larson's masterpiece-- even in our backward small town.  She lived life hard and fast, and at the time, my puritanical self wasn't comfortable with that.  Anna was outside the mainstream that I was stuck in.  When Anna died in a car accident heading back to college after Christmas break in 1997, her parents asked me to sing "Seasons of Love," Rent's best-known song, at her funeral.  Soon thereafter, I realized how astonishingly foolish I'd been.  I learned a lot about myself and about accepting others.  It's our differences that make us amazing.  I broke quickly out of my shell, and in the end took on many of the fiercely individualistic traits which once made me question her lifestyle. 

I've been thinking a lot about Anna lately, and about my friend Becca who died in 2006.  Both amazing women-- strong, independent.  I can't believe it's been 14 years since Anna died.  I try every day to live in a way that would make them proud.  I have been so lucky to have these 14 years to make music--to connect to people, to sing, to conduct, to travel, to learn...

"There's only us
There's only this
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss

No other road
No other way
No day but today"

 

Rent closed on Broadway in 2008, but it's impact, especially in my life, will never be over.