This is not about Rent.

Oh, all right, it is a bit. But I'm aware that this blog is in danger of becoming more like a review column, so I will only mention briefly that I saw Rent today, and it was excellent, although I really wished Paul Fagamalo could have seen his way to belting out 'Old Man River' from the scaffolding as he did such a fine job of it in Showboat. Made me cry, he did.



This time around, Michael Murphy made me cry, and not because he was bad as I was secretly half-expecting him to be. I thought he was marvellous, with a raw quality to his singing that fitted the role extremely well, and some very poignant acting. Well. What a turn-up that was.



We met him once, Me and My Girl, at one of my rare appearances on Good Morning. I suspect I was there reviewing other people's books as I don't believe I had any out myself at the time. Michael, meanwhile, had very recently not won NZ Idol, and seemed to be doing quite nicely out of his it - better than the winner, at any rate. My daughter, who was only about seven at the time, was completely overwhelmed; Michael was really lovely and called her 'Gorgeous' which incapacitated her still further, while fluffing his hair in the mirror in the Green Room rather a lot. He posed for a photo which we still have somewhere, Michael looking ludicrously young and fluffy-haired and my girl completely fan-faced, frozen to his side in a thrilled-yet-terrified pose. Then we picked up our new car in Christchurch, drove it all the way back to Auckland, and sang his song 'All We Are' for ten days straight in our open-topped Nissan Figaro. Ah, memories.



As for Rent itself - well, I do have to mention it just a little. For a start, I've now sung Seasons of Love in two different miniscule productions, and realised anew how appalling we were (or I was, at least) by comparison. Or perhaps not even by comparison.



Today, however, I spent a large part of the production reminiscing about when I first saw Rent, which was in about 1998, off-Broadway. I'd gone to New York for a hen weekend of all things (living in the UK and flush with money at the time, this was the sort of thing I could do. This was obviously before I became a writer). Being unable to get into any of the shows we'd heard of and actually wanted to see, we ended up with ragged seats in a crumbly theatre with vagrants in the doorway, wondering what on earth we'd let ourselves in for. And then the magic began ... Christmas bells are ringing!



Despite the near-constant screaming of fans, and the crowds waiting to mob the cast out on the street, we had no idea that we were there during the infancy of something very special, in the place where it belonged, at a time when the show's contents still had a potent and immediate resonance. When I went back to NY just a couple of years later, all the vagrants were all gone; I've no idea where Rent had got to.



That night, full of song and bonhomie and cheap wine, with at least one of us wearing a veil and waving a blow-up penis, we blew our budgets a little and travelled to the top of the World Trade Center for cocktails. Now that's gone too. Hard to imagine. Aids and drug abuse have apparently disappeared, too, cleared off the streets by the Mayor's road-sweepers, only to be replaced by other ills - although people are still being squeezed out of their homes by profiteering property nasties like Benny.



Hey, I know what I'll do - I'm going to write the New Millenium version of Rent. Picture this: four people meet on death row. One has had to sell his wife and children into the Philippino sex trade; another has robbed a bank and gunned down the teller; the other two were in a race to murder their broker from Goldman Sachs and ending up taking down the whole Futures floor. It'll feature anguish and loss and destitution, and, naturally, many many great songs like: 'Will you charge my I-Pad?' and 'Christmas Bells are Outlawed'. I'll call it (cue jazz hands) ... "MORTGAGE!"



Plus, I can start writing the first review straight away ... featuring brilliant performances from Michael Murphy, Paul Fagamalo, John Barrowman and the newly-trained and frankly fantastic Jill Marshall, this is a searing comment on corporate capitalist America that blah de blah de blah ...



Ah, yes, I can hear it all now. New plays, me in the plays, reviews, blogs about reviews. So, so many ways to listen to the sound of my own voice ...