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A conversation with Courtney Oliver
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Cast of Rent. Photo: Peter Dale
Courtney Oliver—director and choreographer of Rent, which runs until July 26th at Playhouse on the Square—began as an intern at Playhouse 10 years ago after receiving a degree in Theater and English from University of Alabama. She has directed three plays for the company (Rent is her first main stage production) and refers to herself as the resident choreography. She says, “If choreography is involved, I’m involved.” We spoke days after Rent’s opening which played to a sold out and enthusiastic house that shouted and applauded between songs.
DP: The scene when Roger and Mimi (the main love interests) meet is sung, but you staged it more of less as someone would a straight play. Can you talk, as the choreographer, about when you decided to use formal choreography and when you didn’t?
CO: I treated this play as if it’s not a musical. I didn’t ever come in with a lot of choreography in mind. The only song that was deliberately choreographed was the tango. Because the script specifies that they tango. But everything else I call ‘walkography’. (She laughs.)You can apply the word choreography to it because you’re moving to music and your choices have to be deliberate—it’s not just blocking. But at the same time you can’t approach it as dance because it’s not that either.
DP: What about the show do you think audiences responded to so strongly that allowed it to run for 12 years on Broadway?
CO: Nothing had been done like that ever before. Musical theater had been taken so seriously: you had Les Miserable, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon… these massive productions with helicopters and chandeliers. No one had taken a couple of blocks and a couple of kids and thrown them on a Broadway stage before. But part of its popularity too was the fact that Jonathan Larson (creator) died on its preview night. The whole message of the show is live today as though it’s your last. And he drove that message home by unexpectedly dying. I think it gained media attention, and once it had the media’s attention it had everyone else’s.DP: Now, almost 15 years after the play was written, the East Village (the play’s setting) has become gentrified to the point where squatting is pretty much a thing of the past, what do you think became of the people that the play’s characters were based on?
CO: I think they went out finally and got jobs. They said ‘I can be a homeless junkie and throw everything away or I can actually find a way to make money.’ When everyone started getting computers and cell phones, every graphic artist or photographer or recording artist knew they could never get ahead unless they learned these programs that Apple was putting out. I think the people who got out, the people who are doing something now, are the people who recognize that they have to change with their own times. It doesn’t mean they have to be gentrified; it means they have to keep up. ‘I want that new laptop, so I’m going to work at the coffee shop until I can save enough money.’ You have to work just as hard to be an artist as you do to be a scientist. I think people woke up a little bit.
DP: What do you think these people would think about seeing themselves portrayed on the stage?
CO: It’s hard. I know these people; I’m exactly the right age. And there’s a part of you that thinks ‘God we were such idiots.’ There’s another part of you that thinks, ‘Life was never better than that.’ But then again you also look at it and think there’s no way to capture the essence of such a particular time. People say that about Hair, too. I think anyone who sees a production of Hair now, who actually lived in the sixties and went through that, might say: ‘There’s no theatrical performance that can capture the true essence of what it smelled like in the air then.’ I think the Gen-Xers that watch Rent now have to understand they’re watching a play, not a reality.
DP: When the play opened in 1996, New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley called Rent the “hope for the future of the American musical." Thirteen years later do you think he was right?
CO: Yes. I think what happened is that the American musical was allowed to not be so formal. That’s what Rent did for the genre. You didn’t have to be a trained opera singer or a graduate of a conservatory to make great musical theater; you didn’t have to wear a black tie to come and see a show. It made musical theater accessible to young people who otherwise felt too out of place in a Broadway theater.
The skinny:
Rent
Book, Music and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson
Playhouse in the Square
June 26th – July 26th
Ticket info
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