As those who might have watched Rent with starry-eyed fantasies of chasing an artistic dream got older, some became less sympathetic with the scrappy vagabonds. Rent's receding relevance is also in large part thanks to the aging of its audience. The music serves the choreography, the words serve the story, but they don't serve one another. The words and the music sometimes play as if two radios have been left on at the same time. If you stand back from the importance of "Rent" as a cultural artifact and a statement about AIDS, does it stand on its own as a musical? I don't think so. Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, questioned the integrity of the musical itself: When Rent was adapted into a movie in 2005 - with most of the original cast reprising their roles - it was almost universally shrugged at, but not just because director Chris Columbus's big screen version was lacking. The fact that Larson was once a well-off Westchester County kid who then delighted in the East Village's squalor inspired accusations that he had romanticized a terrible situation. Rent's music aped the popular music of the era, to mixed effect. The flip side of such of-the-moment subject matter, though, is the risk of quickly becoming outdated. It sneered at gentrification - embodied by Taye Diggs's sellout landlord, Benny - and trumpeted the virtues of living your artistic truth, no matter how grimy things got. It was held together by alt-rock and grunge. It was deliberately diverse, with queer characters and a cast that featured Hispanic and black leads. Rent tackled the frustrated, defiant aftermath of the first wave of the AIDS crisis, putting HIV positive characters at the forefront. Sure, it was technically set in 1989, but the musical is far more about the decade's response to the '80s than anything else.
When it comes to 1990s time capsules, though, you can't do much better than Rent. Why revisit an outdated format now that we have MP3s and streaming? Looking back at Rent today, after 20 years of pop culture progression, is a little like listening to music on a cassette tape. The thing is, Rent hasn't aged well because Larson wrote a musical that was entirely of its time.
But Rent is neither as great a musical as many people originally thought, nor quite as bad as its most fervent detractors would rant about to you now.
It was inevitable that Rent would fall from grace anything so universally lauded will eventually encounter some pushback.
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