Daphne, Adam, and Anthony Interview

How the Show Goes On: an Interview With "Roger," "Mimi," and "Mark."

Originally from Interview Magazine

Written by: Peter Galvin

Issue: June, 1996

Imagine for a moment what it might be like to have a beer with Beauty and the Beast or dinner with Norma Desmond - to actually sit down with one of them would be creepy and surreal. Like the characters who inhabit them, the current crop of Broadway musicals - so many revivals and soulless spectacles - seem out of touch with reality. The exception is Rent, the rock opera based on Puccini's La Boheme, which first opened in Manhattan's East Village in February to some of the most ecstatic reviews of the past decade. Critics raved about its honest portrayal of eight friends struggling in an urban landscape where AIDS, drug abuse, and homelessness are an everyday reality. Rent's early success was clouded by the death of its creator, Jonathan Larson, of an aortic aneurysm shortly after the final dress rehearsal. Larson's absence becomes increasingly poignant - not to mention ironic - as the show's momentum continues to build; it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in early April, opened on Broadway with a multimillion-dollar advance a few weeks later, and is expected to feature prominently in this month's Tony Awards ceremony.

Shortly before Rent moved to its Broadway home - described by the cast as "the big house" - I met three of its actors: Adam Pascal, who is Roger, an HIV-positive songwriter; Daphne Rubin-Vega, who plays Roger's girlfriend, Mimi, a dancer in an S&M club who develops AIDS; and Anthony Rapp, who plays Mark, a documentary filmmaker who lives with Roger in an abandoned building. All are characters that I could imagine getting to know. Since that is obviously impossible, I did the next best thing - I hung out with the actors who play them.

PETER GALVIN: What was your experience with musical theater before Rent?

ADAM PASCAL: None. I was in the same rock band, Mute, from junior high until about three months before Rent.

DAPHNE RUBIN-VEGA: I worked on Randy Newman's [musical version of] Faust at the La Jolla Playhouse, and before Rent I was in a girl group called Pajama Party. I did years of shit like shaking my butt around.

ANTHONY RAPP: When I was ten I did a Broadway musical called The Little Prince and the Aviator, which previewed for two weeks and closed. I toured in The King and I with Yul Brynner. I also did Precious Sons on Broadway with Ed Harris and Six Degrees of Separation at Lincoln Center. But before Rent, I hadn't done a musical in years.

PG: I'd like to play devil's advocate. How much do you think the success of Rent is about media hype and how much is about true quality and substance?

AP: The hype sparks people's interest in the show and gets them in, but I think they are genuinely moved and impressed once they see it. We happen to be in a quality play that backs up the hype.

PG: Why do you think Rent has provoked such a huge response?

AP: I think it's partly because people are sick of seeing the same old crap on Broadway - revivals of musicals that were written a hundred years ago.

DRV: Jonathan [Larson] upped the stakes by creating a show that's very fresh and very genuine. Rent is expanding the idea of what's possible in musical theater.

PG: It seems there's an implicit assumption - in both the theater world and the music industry - that Broadway and rock music are incompatible. Why is that?

AP: Because the musicals we've had for the past twenty years - especially all this Andrew Lloyd Webber stuff - are so far from the spirit of rock 'n' roll that there's been no reason to think otherwise.

PG: Why do you think Andrew Lloyd Webber shows are so popular?

AR: People would rather just sit there and take something in than be "hit in the chest with a two-by-four," as our music director [Tim Weil] says. Andrew Lloyd Webber's shows are clever and have beautiful melodies and they're safe. Whereas with good rock 'n' roll there's a naked danger, a full emotional expressiveness that you don't tend to see in musical theater.

PG: Where does Stephen Sondheim fit in? I know he was one of Jonathan's mentors.

AP: Well, from what I understand, scholar that I am [laughs], Sondheim was doing groundbreaking things from the get go. West Side Story [for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics] was, like Rent, an interracial love story about people living on the margins. Sondheim was a hero of Jonathan's because he took the musical and turned it on its ear.

PG: I think the love ballad between the two gay men [played by Jesse L. Martin and Wilson Jermaine Heredia] is one of the best moments in the show. They come off as real people, rather than the cartoons you see in movies like The Birdcage.

AP: Well, the play is about love, and it was obviously important to Jonathan to say that there's no difference in the love between two men, a woman and a man, or two women.

AR: Rent creates this little world that, although it has AIDS and drug addiction, is sort of a social ideal. None of the characters are prejudiced; they're all friends, and everybody loves each other. It's a fantasy world I think everybody wishes could be true.

DRV: Not everyone. I think some people are going to be outraged. Last year, in the workshop, people walked out when they saw the lesbian characters [played by Indina Menzel and Fredi Walker] kissing. That's the world we live in, which is why I find it very moving when older people identify with the show; when they can see beyond the gayness, the straightness, the class, the color.

PG: There's talk in music-industry circles about the possibility of taking songs from Rent and giving them to pop stars like Whitney Houston to sing. How do you guys feel about that? Are you protective of these songs?

DRV: Yeah!

AP: We're all very protective. I don't get how you can take one song from this show and record it by itself. They're all intertwined and related.

PG: But wouldn't Jonathan have wanted that - to create songs that become pop standards?

DRV: It's not that he wouldn't want that. It's more about the fact that this show was created for the love of the arts. But when success starts to happen, it's more about the marketability of the art, and that's what's really disturbing. It's touchy because Jonathan was riding this wave with us and then - boom! - he's not here anymore.

AR: I certainly wouldn't want anything stupid to happen, but if a song from this show gets played on the radio, I'll be fuckin' thrilled.

AP: It's ridiculous to think of someone like Whitney Houston singing these songs. The spirit and energy of the play is about struggle, and if you want to get the life of the songs across, you need to have somebody singing them who isn't making fucking five million [dollars] a year.

PG: What about how the show is going to affect your own marketability? You don't have a problem with that, do you?

AP: Of course not. [laughs] We're not going to be doing Rent for the rest of our lives, so it would be ridiculous not to use the momentum to succeed in other aspects of our careers. I've been waiting my entire life to get a record deal, and I'm hoping this play will help me do that.

DRV: Right now it's about seizing the opportunity, because someday people are going to say, "Rent? What's that?" Four months ago, the word career was not in my vocabulary, and this experience has helped me get a fabulous agent and a fabulous manager.

AR: I just want to keep working. I want to be respected and sought after. I want to be in a position where my name will help get something produced.

AP: But for now, we're just actors in a show.

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