Students warm up in the PMAC blackbox before a recent Rent rehearsal. Photo by Jenny Guo/The Choate News
This year’s spring musical, Rent, marks a dramatic change for Choate’s theater program. The former Broadway musical, written in 1996 by Jonathan Larson, follows the lives of eight New Yorkers as they face the growing AIDS crisis. The show, often called a “rock opera,” diverges from past Choate productions in both its music and subject matter.
Students performing in the musical have proven themselves up for the challenge of performing in a play that touches on such serious matter, and the first few weeks of rehearsal have been a success.
While Choate musicals have often taken on lighter fare such as cheerleading (Bring It On, 2018) and the jovially macabre (The Addams Family, 2017), Rent deals with the AIDS crisis that ravaged major cities, like the play’s setting of New York City, beginning in the 1970s. Furthermore, several students are taking on roles who have sexual orientations different from their own, potentially creating controversy regarding the representation of these characters’ experiences.
Though only four of the musical’s eight main characters have the disease, the crisis profoundly affects the lives of the entire group. “You really can’t play around with this musical,” said Maxwell Brown ’21, who plays Tom Collins, a character infected with AIDS. “This deals with a real crisis, a real epidemic. It’s definitely more than just, ‘I want to tell a story.’ [It serves to] put this epidemic forth to the community and raise awareness.”
Additionally, the musical presents a wider variety of identifiers than typically seen in Choate productions. In Rent, there is both a gay couple and a lesbian couple. “In terms of identifiers, I think it’s just going to be more of, like, how much have we seen of that on stage? And it’s casual — they’re together throughout the show. It’s not one kiss and everyone gasps. It’s a relationship that’s on stage,” said Jana Godbole ’19, who plays Mimi Marquez, an HIV-positive main character.
Zachery plays Benny, a lead character that’s been exiled from the main group. He’s the newly-rich landlord of some of the other main characters; consequently, there’s a bit of tension between him and the rest of the group. Zachery said, “He’s the ex-friend of the leads. Some people perceive him as the bad guy of the play, but going deep into it, he’s more just trying to help everyone out by giving them the opportunity.”
