Lease on life

Julia Santana on taking Rent on the road

by Bill Rodriguez

There are harder burdens to bear in American musical theater, but when critic Ben Brantley of the sedate New York Times said that Rent "shimmers with hope for the future of the American musical," those sure were some heavy laurels. Rent is due at the Providence Performing Arts Center June 9-14, so we'll see for ourselves just how bright that future is.

The 1996 Pulitzer and four Tonys were ironic accolades for a raucous tale of the hopeless and the hopeful in the bohemian arts scene of Manhattan's East Village. It's an update of Puccini's La Boheme, with the score pulsing with salsa and grunge backbeats, and AIDS replacing consumption as the emblematic disease. Its wary lovers are an Anglo and a Latina instead of an aristocrat and a gypsy, and the HIV virus is ticking away within each of them instead of tuberculosis threatening only her.

Just before it opened, Rent earned its credentials as a paean to artists struggling in the face of death. On the night of the final dress rehearsal, the musical's unknown librettist and composer, Jonathan Larson, died of an aortic aneurysm, days short of his 36th birthday. He had been working on his musical for six years and hope had been in the air.

The director of the original production, Michael Greif, made a point of not casting Broadway professionals, opting for freshness over polish. For better or worse, the policy was continued with the two national touring companies. Julia Santana, who plays the co-lead role of Mimi, was in a musical at age 11, but the 20something has since put most of her aspiration into developing a singing career off stage. Just before her Rent audition, she signed a recording contract with Atlantic Records with her band, the Cribb. Nevertheless, she's collected some encouraging press clippings in her 11 months on the road. An Atlanta critic gushed that she "is one of the best features of the production."

Santana spoke recently by phone about her Rent experiences.

Q: What do you want audiences to get out of seeing this musical?

A: Most certainly joy and the good feeling of what, I guess, Jonathan Larson was writing about, which is a sense of celebrating life and love and living each day to the fullest, as if it were our last, you know -- there's no day but today.

Q: Obviously, Mimi is a very complex person. There's a lot of fear and anger in her. Has your understanding of Mimi changed over the course of the run?

A: Yes, it has. She actually chooses not to live her life in fear. And she takes each day and lives it to the fullest, with a lot of heart. She's HIV-positive and she decided that the only way she can live her life is day by day, and living with as much happiness and without fear as much as possible.

Q: And you approached it differently when you were first in rehearsal?

A: Well, rehearsals were nerve-racking for me because I hadn't been in musical theater for so many years. Most of my creativity and my main motivation and focus has been on music. So doing this on this level has been completely brand new to me. Doing a rock opera of this caliber -- Rent is a great show, a breakthrough musical of the '90s -- to be a part of that, and to get the leading role on top of it, I mean, it was overwhelming. So all I did, pretty much, was to soak up as much information as possible. When I got the part three days before the actual rehearsal, I didn't have real time to research to role or anything.

But being that I was born and raised in Manhattan, a lot of instincts there were pretty natural. That really helped a lot, knowing the environment in New York. And having a lot of friends, struggling artists. Seeing people struggle with drugs -- I mean, you walk down the street and there are heroin addicts begging for change or just falling down in the street.

If anything has changed, I think it's that I've become a little more relaxed with the role.

Q: Was there a scene that you had a particularly hard time with, that took you a while to feel you had conveyed it?

A: Well, it would probably be the section of "Goodbye, Love," when she's telling Roger goodbye, but she really doesn't want to let him go. It was her real first love and she really wanted to fulfill that, but he's just too scared, he is living too much in fear to accept that kind of love. It was really difficult for me to get into that part of "Goodbye, Love," letting go and really just falling apart and making it genuine. You can go up there and act like you're falling apart, but they can tell right away if it's genuine or not. It's strenuous and it really takes a toll on the heart, you know. So when I run off stage I feel really icky at that point. I'm like: "Oh, I've really got to get out of this moment!"

Q: If you weren't in the production, how do you think you'd like it as a love story?

A: I would think it's a beautiful, beautiful story. Besides being a breakthrough piece of work in theater, it's really moving.

What I love about the show, how it moves me, is that it doesn't focus on the gay or lesbian issue or HIV. It doesn't turn that into the issue, because that's not what the story is about. It goes beyond that. It doesn't turn that into a taboo.

Q: So, years from now, when the HIV threat is history, you think Rent will pack as much of a punch?

A: Oh, yeah. I think so. I think it's definitely a classic already. It's a part of history now, and it will always have that impact.