When in 1994 Anthony Rapp auditioned for the New York Theatre Workshop’s four-week workshop of Jonathan Larson’s Rent, he sang the R. E. M. “Losing My Religion,” nailed the audition and completed his first step towards nailing the leading Mark Cohen role.
He also began more than that, more than transferring to Broadway as he recalled in his 2006 Without You, a Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical. In the well-received volume, he logged the extraordinary high points the production reached in theater annals and the sad low points also reached during its initial 5,123 performances run. The most affecting segment was bookwriter-composer-lyricist Larson’s death on January 25, 1996, prior to Rent‘s opening.
Now extending his long and grateful association with the theater-rock classic, Rapp revisits Without You, shortening it extensively to expand it into a fired-up Rent-stabilized musical of the same title that incorporates not only “Losing My Religion” but also many of Larson’s Tony-winning-Pulitzer-Prize-winning songs and a few Rapp has written, some with others like Tom Kitt, Joe Pisapia, David Matos, and arranger-conductor Daniel A. Weiss.
[Read Frank Sheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
And here’s where a busy reviewer raises an odd question. Does Without You represent an incipient trend or merely a coincidence? It is, you see, the second monologue delivered by a grieving male that this dazed reviewer has attended within four recent days. The first is Sugar Daddy, during which Sam Morrison discusses his lover’s demise. Rapp’s covers in some detail not only Larson’s succumbing to an aneurysm resulting from an undiagnosed Marfan’s Syndrome but his mother Mary’s death following a long cancer battle.
Much of what is intriguing about these two indisputably heartfelt pieces is their handling disparate responses to grief. Morrison, a comedian, finds his way through humor. Though Rapp had already addressed his in the memoir, he has apparently concluded the well-received book hasn’t sufficiently revealed his persistent feelings.
His current platform is the musical, a genre with which he’s been enamored since childhood – and, among other assignments, singing “Who Will Buy” in a local Oliver revival when he was six and encouraged by his Mom.
So here on a well-lit, theatrical set by Eric Southern – including separate boxed areas for five musicians led by music director Weiss, Rapp recalls his association with Rent from that audition for NYTW’s artistic director James Nicola and director Michael Greif. He continues through the workshop rehearsals, the successful four-week run there, and the Broadway preparation sometime later. He pointedly emphasizes the shock of Larson’s sudden death and its subsequent events.
He notes that the fact Rent, a spin on Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, deals with death appeared to be lost on no one. Certainly, “Without You,” which includes the repeated lyric “I die without you,” and “Seasons of Love,” which also has a reference to dying, underline his fervent message.
(The latter anthem is perhaps the last bid for becoming a standard introduced in a musical, musicals at one time the source of a high percentage of 20th century standards.)
To be sure, Rapp doesn’t limit his Rent recollections to death and grief. On the subject of the musical, he remembers Larson in many different moods. He’s amused by his new friend’s boisterously introducing himself as “the future of musical comedy.” (Wasn’t this bit of info also included in last year’s tick, tick…Boom! film, with Andrew Garfield playing Larson as someone extremely sold on himself?)
Perhaps even more than reliving his grief for Larson, Rapp talks at length about how his mother influenced him, about how she eventually accepted his homosexuality, about how, a nurse herself, she endured dealing with a terminal condition. He makes it clear she is constantly in his thoughts and that they those thoughts are often what sustain him.
Furthermore, he makes it obvious that music also sustains him, his singing throughout this Without You version rich, youthful, and strong. Now close to 30 years after encountering Larson’s creative and in some instances mold-breaking score, he interprets it with the same commitment he did when first portraying photographer Mark Cohen, one of the East Village chums who vociferously wonder why, as self-proclaimed artists, they should be obliged to pay rent.
Under Steven Maler’s sympathetic direction and under numerous evocative David Bengali projections he confidently takes the stage, although possibly having to arrange and rearrange the five unmatched chairs there more often than seems absolutely necessary.
When Rent was filmed in 2005, Rapp, Adam Pascal and only a few other original cast members were cast. He devotes only the final Without You chapters to the filmmaking. In the last one he writes, “I realized I would never grow tired of Rent’s music. I will always be grateful to Jonathan for having written such gorgeous songs, which continued to fulfill and reward and reveal themselves in the singing of them, all these years later.”
The reworked 2023 Without You is a testament to his standing by this simultaneously joyful and grieving conviction.
Without You opened January 25, 2023, at New World Stages and runs through June 11 . Tickets and information: telecharge.com
