(*) RENT by Jonathan Larson, St. Mary's University, San Antonio, April 11 - 17, 2013

presents

RENT

by Jonathan Larson

Directed by Adam Burke

Musical Direction by Jacob Cantu

Scenic & Lighting Design by Dion Denevan

Choreography by Bernadette Hamilton-Brady

St. Mary's University Theatre
 

Location: 1 Camino Santa Maria, San Antonio, Texas, 78228-8580

Click to view campus map with Reinboldt Theatre highlighted

Times: April 11-14, 16-17. Curtain is at 7:30 p.m. for all performance dates.
Tickets: $15 for General Admission $10 for Students (with ID),Senior Citizens, Military and SATCO members

For More Information:

For further information on reservations and ticket purchase, please contact us via e-mail at stmutheatre@stmarytx.edu or call us at 210.436.3545. Cash, checks or credit cards are accepted at the box office.

Creator Jonathan Larson summarizes his musical in December 1995 as this: "RENT is about a community celebrating life, in the face of death and AIDS, at the turn of the century." Based loosely on Puccini's LA BOHEME, RENT reflects a new generation's approach to the American musical.

This is a joint production of St. Mary's University Music and Drama Departments.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Rent, Zach Theatre, September 16 - October 31

Rent is the sort of production the Zach theatre uses to pay the rent: the staging of a familiar rock and roll work with appeal for the young, for the young professionals, for the creatives and for the club goers. Seen as daring at its 1996 debut, Rent has become sufficiently mainstream that it can be staged in community theatres, summer theatres, and, this past February, even by the kidsActing studio here in Austin.

Director Dave Steakley gets a powerhouse performance from a cast consisting redundantly of "local Austin artists."

You just can't help being seduced by the spotlight numbers in this show: winsome Andrew Cannata and Kristen Bennett doing the wickedly funny Tango Maureen, the irrepressibly strutting Joshua Denning as Angel the drag queen extraordinaire in the damn-your-eyes-love-me glitzy Today 4 U (Tomorrow 4 Me), and Ginger Leigh's leering, laughing physicality in the trippy story about the cow that jumped Over the Moon.

Multi-talented Jonathan Larson did book, music and lyrics for a story that he based loosely on Puccini's La Bohème, the elegantly sentimental 1896 opera portraying a bunch of down and art artists in Paris and the doomed romance between a writer and Mimi, the street waif who dies of tuberculosis in the last act.

Puccini's work has been called the most popular opera of all time, and Larson's use of it is a savagely ironic premise. No doubt all those affluent parents in Scarsdale and similar well-trimmed suburbs (West Lake Hills, for example, or Lakeway) had the cash and leisure to buy opera tickets, as their neglected children grew up unguided and then slipped off to the grim-smeared once-upon-a-time low-rent districts of the Bowery.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .