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'Rent' paves career path for Rapp
"Rent" fans, this is the tour you don't want to miss.
The rock musical, loosely based on "La Boheme," is about a group of friends struggling to survive in Manhattan's Lower East Side and reach the world through their art. In place of the opera's tuberculosis there are AIDS and drug addiction.
Leading the current tour are stars of the original Broadway and film production, Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal, once again playing the starving artist roommates (writer and musician).
Rapp has made the entire "Rent" journey. He was there playing Mark when the show that became a phenomena started as a workshop in fall, 1994. "Of course there was no way of knowing it would stay in my life as profoundly as it did."
Rapp knew about being a starving artist - he'd been scrambling since he arrived in New York in 1989. After "Rent," he never had to work at Starbucks again.
"Rent" took Rapp to Off-Broadway, Broadway, Chicago, and London productions, as well as reprising his role in the musical's screen adaptation.
While Rapp has never appeared on stage in Cincinnati, he's not new to the city. An advocate for theater education, he worked with students at Walnut Hills High School as they prepped for a production of "Rent" and attended the show and cast party.
Rapp says he's planning on getting together with friends that he made here during the short run but the road isn't someplace where he can write his music or consider another manuscript.
"The nature of my job in the show is intense, so I tend to just chill." He adds that, older and wiser, he's actually holding up better in the show 15 years later, including yoga, stretching, eating more carefully and not having to deal with traumas including the near-legendary death of show creator Jonathon Larsen and his mother's terminal illness.
"Rent" is a big part of Rapp's résumé, but he has also appeared on Broadway and regional theater in plays and musicals, including the first national tour of "Little Shop of Horrors," while piling up film and television credits.
Over the last several years, in addition to his work as an actor, Rapp has released a solo CD entitled "Look Around;" written a New York Times bestselling memoir of his experiences on and offstage during his initial "Rent" run, titled "Without You" (Simon & Schuster) and recently adapted it for the stage, which he's hoping to bring to new York next season.
If the memoir was "the hardest thing I've ever done," the most difficult part of performing it onstage in its Pittsburgh debut were the rehearsals.
"Those were tough emotionally, but in performance, I was comforted by it - every day I felt like I was talking to my mom."
