The thing that came through most clearly was everybody’s earnest desire to make it as honest as possible, their desire to be here, to make it real, to live through it, to illuminate it. “We learned the music the first couple of days and then at the end of the week we read through it. Kiersey Clemons (“Hearts Beat Loud”) is Joanne Jefferson Jordan Fisher (“Grease: Live”) is Mark Cohen Brennin Hunt (“Nashville”) is Roger Davis and Valentina (“RuPaul’s Drag Race”) is Angel Dumott Schunard. “Nicole Scherzinger and I was blown away by her performance and thinking, ‘That is a hell of a part.’ I wasn’t ready yet, but one day I to play Maureen, and that day has arrived,” Hudgens says. Seasoned theater performer Brandon Victor Dixon (“Hamilton,” “Jesus Christ Superstar Live”) was cast as Tom Collins, while recording artists Tinashe and Mario were cast as Mimi Marquez and Benjamin Coffin III, respectively, and Vanessa Hudgens, who played Mimi in a 2010 Hollywood Bowl production of the show, took on the role of Maureen Johnson. The acting ensemble was put together in a similar way - one that was, as Greif points out, akin to the original Broadway company, who came from “a lot of disparate parts of show business” but were “brought together” by the material. The production team behind Fox’s version includes a mix of those who worked with Larson on the original version of “Rent,” including Greif and costume designer Angela Wendt some who have later but still personal connections to the theater run, such as music director Stephen Oremus, who got his start on the 1999 touring production, and production designer Jason Sherwood, who grew up as a fan and those such as choreographer Sonya Tayeh and live television director Alex Rudzinski, who are new to the story but whose expertise in their craft will help “enhance” both the storytelling and the emotion behind it, says Greif.
“For a young person it ignites that part of you, and for an older person it wakes up that part of you again, and that’s the most fun thing to put into people’s living rooms.”
“‘Rent’ was written by this young man who believed in true love, standing for what you believed in that art was more important than anything else - all of these things that at some point in our lives we all believed too,” Siegel says.
Starting as a staged reading in 1993 before moving to Broadway just three years later, the emphasis was on the characters and the story, illuminating themes of love and passion, sexual freedom, identity, art and personal fulfillment. “Rent” found inspiration in Giacomo Puccini’s “La Boheme” but, in Larson’s version, became a modernized, edgier, more rock-style story about young artists living with HIV in the East Village in the early 1990s.
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