27 February 2009
Flashback to 1996
I went to see the musical Rent with my friend Amy. It was at the Pantages, which is a beautiful old theatre in Hollywood. The crowd was particularly partisan and clearly knew each scene and song that was coming up next (they could've probably done a 'Rocky Horror' type participatory thing with this crowd). What struck me was how things have changed since the show came out. In New York now, it would probably be impossible to have a group of artists living in an abandoned warehouse in Manhattan (where are all the poor artists in New York living now?) and AIDS is a disease that while is still not curable, many people are able to live with it for years. It's definitely not the death sentence that is depicted in the musical. Still, the idea of a bohemian artist community fighting to stay true to their art and dying young has been around for hundreds of years (I suspect it did not start with the opera La Boheme on which this was based) and the emotional impact is still strong.
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I was going to say that the artists are in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but honestly that's about ten years old, too. The last time I was in the Lower East Side it kind of horrified me how gentrified and hip it had gotten. I remember being freaked out coming out of bars after midnight in that area; now it's like walking out of a multiplex into a mall.
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