It's that sort of poignancy that continues to hold Rent's audiences — that, and its celebration of a compassionate, accepting community. Its lyrics, music, and book are not stand-out as musicals go, but as a celebration of both a particular cultural moment and a timeless one, it endures — and it had my neighbors in the audience humming along.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com.

RENT | by Jonathan Larson | directed by Michael Donovan | Produced by Lyric Music Theater, in South Portland | through March 5 | 207.799.1421

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ARTICLES BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
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  •   THOUGHTFUL LAUGHS IN WITTENBERG  |  May 09, 2013
    Much has been made of Prince Hamlet's exhausting philosophical indecision. To be or not? To kill or not? He has a hell of a time figuring it out, when he should be happily ensconced in college life back in Wittenberg.
  •   TWELVE MAINE PLAYS IN ACORN’S FESTIVAL  |  May 03, 2013
    It's time once again for Acorn Productions' annual celebration of the playwrights living among us.
  •   A SURREAL COMEDY FROM DRAMATIC REP  |  April 24, 2013
    Life is in upheaval for these four friends, and all of them will need to go deep to make sense of things in Swimming in the Shallows , a comedy with a touch of the surreal, by Adam Bock.
  •   WOOLF’S ORLANDO ON STAGE AT USM  |  April 25, 2013
    Insights into both the masculine and the feminine are at the center of Virginia Woolf's Orlando , a fabulist commentary on the fluidity of gender and sexual identity.
  •   CAROLYN GAGE’S NEW SHORT PLAYS GIVE WOMEN VOICE  |  April 10, 2013
    Women's experience of slavery, genocide, and cultural oppression, says playwright Carolyn Gage, is very different than men's: Sexual violence and women's ability to give birth makes them subject to a particularly penetrating form of colonization. And even the best-intentioned histories, she adds, often try to "disappear" that difference.

 See all articles by: MEGAN GRUMBLING

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