(note: Please just try as best one can to consider the generalizations in the first segment some unresolved psychological baggage. Of course, not all actors are the way I describe, but my god, every time I've gone in to be an actor, director, non-rockband singer, it's turned into a humiliating hell in a handbasket.
I refuse to believe the problem is just me.)
Actors hate me, they always have, and I've always hated them back. It's a lifelong enmity, and much too much trouble to get into specifics, but secure people know better than to choose acting as a profession. The vast majority of actors think they're weird, but they're so unbelievably normal. When they encounter a person who is truly weird, they turn into teenagers, which in turn turns the object of their scorn into the terrified, angry teen he doubtless once was. I always get along much better with techies in spite of having no mechanical ability at all, and certainly got along much better with the other musicians in the pit.
Just the very idea of ever going back on-stage to act or sing provokes something akin to trauma, and the idea of ever directing a show again provokes something akin to a Vietnam flashback complete with helicopters, slow motion deaths, and The Doors or Barber's Adagio playing in the background.
Theater is wasted on actors. It's the greatest place in the world where all the artistic glories of the world can be synthesized into a supersublimity - not rendered on a 2-D screen by rich stoners in California but by people right in front of you. But there's something about the extroversion required for stage fortitude that precludes introspection. To be a really good stage performer, you need to be so present in the moment that your temperament requires a constant state of overstimulation. It shouldn't be a secret why actors and singers are so drawn to sex and drugs... The very idea of the patience required for introspection is anathema to a real stage temperament.
Growing up, I always thought I was a stage guy, but I'm the opposite. A library with a stereo is what I was put on earth to live in, a place where no one can break your heart, nobody can talk shit about each other, and the only socialization you need can be done online where the real life consequences are minimal. The mind becomes free to wander away from anxieties of social interaction which are somehow both trivial and overwhelming, and can at least steal small bits of peace away from the world of other people too impatient to understand you.
And that's not even getting into the organizational shit or deadlines. Theater, for me, is nothing but a series of panic attacks.
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RENT is, without a doubt, one of my least favorite things in the world. Every minute of it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. It's not even something that's fun to hatelisten to like singing cats.... Everything about it is acute queasiness. It's an amalgam of rock, showtunes, R&B, and opera that strips every one of them of everything interesting about them. Its recited narration makes no sense and stops momentum in its tracks;, and the overall earnestness can induce diabetes. There's nothing inventive about the lyrics, rhythms, harmonies, melodies, characters, scenes, structure or ideas. It is a black hole of false joy. It's a hymn to Bohemianism by a Jewish kid from White Plains who became a Bohemian because any Jewish kid from a Jewish area who had a slight artistic bent was written off as a rebel just for being themselves. RENT is... everything I hate... and maybe because it's exactly the kind of show I might have seen myself writing if my life had broken a very different way. (And if that seems like self-grandiosity, just remember, I think RENT sucks and a couple hundred people could have written it.)
I know Tick, Tick... BOOM is supposed to be a story of hardship. But I look at this and can't help thinking 'Man, this guy had it great. And his music is the perfect reflection of that.' A guy able to organize his own shows in New York with performers at his beckon call, sympathetic and loyal friends who live near him, a glowingly gorgeous girlfriend with another one lining up to take her place the moment she vacates... And he's tall!
And that's the great lie of biopics like this: the martyred 'glamor-saint' has just enough hardship to make his hagiography inspirational, but we don't relate to him by saying 'he's just like me.' We relate to it by saying about him 'I wish I were like him.'
Golden ages were never particularly golden, but whatever music theater was in its 'golden age', the false ebullience of modern music theater is something I just find a cold-blooded lie. For decades before Occupy Wall Street or metoo was a blip on anybody's radar, I've watched the joyful enthusiasm of these kids and could only think 'what amazing lives must you all have to be so happy?' Anybody who's been in the arts for two minutes knows the humiliations that come with the job - the endless begging for money and the endless appeasing of people who have complete control over your future. And yet... you never saw that in the work. It was as though there was a conspiracy of silence about what life was really like. Rodgers and Hammerstein? It's better, but still, so many lies.... Andrew Lloyd Webber? Not even aware of the truth. Jonathan Larson? Everybody is dying of AIDS and addicted to heroin, but it's a wonderful life anyway! You should try it too!
The most inventive song I've ever heard from Jonathan Larson was the comic song in Tick, Tick... Boom (I have no idea if it's in the show...) about his breaking up relationship, and it is... so incredibly annoying that it ate through my ear like a predatory silverfish.
What made it so annoying?... Y'know... aside from that it was probably designed to be annoying.... It's the emotional manipulation of it. He hid the pain under a comic mask that almost deliberately doesn't seem funny. Depending on your point of view, he's let us have a good time at his expense, which is of course his right, but it minimizes not just his pain but his girlfriend's, and also sets an impossible standard for the rest of us. Don't worry, you can work through your problems because with a little distance, emotional pain is adorable!
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Why can't I be more forgiving?....
It's 1990 New York. Most of us don't remember what agony it was because half the people who lived through it are dead. Half an entire generation of American artists and their most reliable audiences were gone in the span of fifteen years - the world's most reliable communities of artists come from gay people and people who use recreational drugs - and AIDS killed off them both. AIDS was a plague from which neither New York nor the world of the arts could ever truly recover. The whole continuity of New York was interrupted, its theater, its music, its art, its dance, its civic activism,... no wonder prices went up around New York because the only people who'd move to Manhattan in droves were working for Wall Street and advertising. And no wonder artists who listen to their own drumbeat have that much less of a chance now than they did.
Purely by bad luck of the genetic draw, Jonathan Larson became the ultimate voice of that generation - silenced as they all were. In the process, he created a musical about Bohemianism and individuality so mainstream that a movie can be made of it directed by the same guy who oversaw the Harry Potter franchise.
It's unfair, it's unjust, that era deserved so much better.
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So yes, the problem is obviously as much me as RENT. RENT is everything I hate about theater. When I listen to it, so many failures of my life have a name and an address. RENT is everything people want that I can't provide. To me it sounds like music and theater defanged and lobotomized. It was created to be a hymn of praise to individualism, non-conformity, chasing dreams - and everything in it sounds to me as though it embodies the opposite.
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