For Rent’s 200th show on the 20th Anniversary Tour, the cast and crew brought the performance to Ohio University on Tuesday, bringing in a sold-out show at Templeton-Blackburn Memorial Auditorium.
The performance brought in theater fans as well as people not so familiar with the story of Rent.
“This show is one of the shows that has shaped me as a human being,” Emily Barbus, a freshman studying journalism, said. “It is one of the reasons why I love theater.”
The lights were on throughout the auditorium while people were trying to find their seats, for obvious reasons. Oddly, they were kept on during the first part of the musical, during a monologue given by the character Mark Cohen, played by Danny Harris Kornfeld.
This led into the first song, “Tune Up/Voice Mail #1,” performed by Kornfeld playing Mark; Kaleb Wells playing Roger Davis; Natalie Lipin playing Mrs. Cohen; Aaron Harrington playing Tom Collins and Christian Thompson playing Benjamin Coffin III.
Then, the cast transitioned into one of the most well-known songs of the musical, “Rent,” performed by the entire cast, which led to a roaring applause from the audience.
The songs throughout the first section caused many different emotions: comedy and sadness wrapped into one act.
The second-to-last song of the first act was sung during one of the comedy scenes. It was the song, “Over The Moon,” performed by Katie Lamark, as the character of Maureen Johnson, who was protesting the fact that the homeless were being evicted from the building they were living in.
She told the story of a cow who says “the only thing to do is jump over the moon.” At the end of the song, she starts to imitate a cow — crawling on the floor and mooing. The final moo brings in the audience: She talked directly to the audience and asked them to moo with her, which everyone did. For a moment, MemAud was full of mooing humans.
After that number, the first act ended with another popular hit from the musical, “La Vie Bohème/I Should Tell You,” performed by the whole cast.
Toward the end of this song, Maureen stood on the table, pulled down her pants and mooned the entire auditorium. Needless to say, the audience was shocked.
During intermission, Amanda D’Agostino, a junior studying psychology and pre-physical therapy, said she had only seen the movie but never the stage version. She expected the show to keep getting better throughout the rest of it.
The second act started out with the most popular song of the musical, “Seasons of Love.” The cast stood in a line across the front of the stage, and after a few minutes of singing, there was a thunder of applause.
Throughout the act, the cast kept coming back to that favorite with different variations each time.
Halfway through the second act was one of the most emotional scenes in the whole musical. After the death of a character in the cast, Harrington sang “I’ll Cover You (Reprise),” and left a good portion of the audience in tears.
At the end of the performance, anyone who hadn’t seen the musical before would think it had an upsetting ending, but right at the last minute, it picks up. It wrapped up with “Your Eyes,” where there was a slideshow playing on the back wall of the stage.
The character, Mark, wants to be a director and is filming during the entire musical. He creates a slideshow of everyone throughout the whole story and it plays during the finale.
After the dramatic ending of Rent, the character who died came back on the stage to join the rest of the cast. They took three bows, and the audience was quick to give a standing ovation.
After the cast ran off the stage and quickly came back on, they linked hands once again and gave two more bows, and the audience’s applause never stopped.
“It was really great and a lot of the singing gave me chills,” Molly Zunski, a freshman studying journalism, said. “I would definitely see it again after tonight's performance.”
