By Sandi Masori
SAN DIEGO — Broadway San Diego is in full swing at the San Diego Civic Theatre with an average of two different shows every month. Right now, rescheduled from both 2020 and 2021, Rent is finally playing through Sunday, April 24th.
My son and I got a chance to see the opening night performance. As with every other show I’ve seen at the Civic Theatre, we ran into people that I knew as soon as we walked in. This time it was Bar Mitzvah planner Lydia Krasner and her husband Ron. I am not a “Renthead,” having never seen the musical in the quarter century between the time it started touring at the La Jolla Playhouse to this final touring performance. It was fortunate that we ran into the Krasners, because Lydia is really knowledgeable about the show and was able to explain some of the plot points that we found confusing.
The rock musical centers around a documentary filmmaker named Mark Cohen, and his starving artist friends. Throughout the show he carries a small camera around, but it’s hard to see it, so we didn’t understand that that’s what was happening until it was explained to us. The show is set in New York City in the 80s during the aids epidemic, and we watch the characters grapple with poverty, AIDS, and drug dependence.
In spite of the seriousness of the topics, the show is lively and energetic and moves at a quick pace. The first half, as I mentioned, was a bit confusing, even as we enjoyed it. Once Lydia gave us the extended narration at intermission, the second half was a lot more clear.
There were strange “Jewish” moments in the show- I guess thrown in there because the lead character is named Mark Cohen. A random “Mazal tov” here, a line about high holidays there, and singing phone messages from his Jewish mother. It was just kinda thrown in, without a lot of context or fanfare, perhaps just to bagel those of us tribesmen sitting in the audience. (Bageling is calling out to another Jew or making Jewish references to signal or determine Jewishness.) Other than Cohen’s name and the few random Yiddishkeit lines, there’s really nothing in the show that has to do with him being Jewish. In fact, it starts at Christmas and takes us through a year to the next Christmas. But it did make the work of finding a Jewish angle for this story easy.
Two actors really stood out – Javon King who played Angel and Aliyana Smash who played Mimi. Both actors exploded onto the stage each time they were on and brought a ton of energy, even in the most somber scenes. All of the actors were fantastic and well-cast though. Overall, we enjoyed the show and would recommend seeing it.
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When Sandi Masori isn’t covering theatre for San Diego Jewish World, she helps people self-publish their books, hangs out with her kids, and hunts for the best sushi in town.