Le O dans TOC

It was okay, the actors were good, but Rent is pretty long and can get slow if you don’t put enough dynamism into it and… They didn’t. Whether it was meant to be like this or it is because it’s actually a previously filmed dress rehearsal and not the actual final product, we will never know, but we can only judge what we got to see.

I was very excited at first because I love this musical as well as Vanessa Hudgens and Jordan Fisher (who were great on Grease Live and were also great here!), but I got kinda bored halfway through.

Vanessa Hudgens did kill the protest scene, which I normally hate, but Take Me Or Leave Me wasn’t enough, and it’s supposed to be such an energetic number.

I wasn’t here for Valentina’s voice.

It felt flat. The small French production of Rent by 27 Saville in October 2018 was on a stage that was like 1/5 of what Rent Live had, and it was still 5x more energetic than this big production with famous actors on American cable TV. And the French one still had way more actors and actual understudies.

And they wouldn’t have /needed/ understudies, since they still had a live audience they still did a concert version of the show, and the actor who broke his foot was here in a wheelchair, he wasn’t hospital-bound. So why not just rework Rent with the wheelchair, since I have already mentioned that there wasn’t that much moving around in the first place anyway, or at least air the concert version? It would have been a much more impactful event, and closer to the promised Rent Live! than what they gave us. Okay, it was still live since they did have an audience in front of them, but we didn’t get to see real time which still symbolically sucks.

It was also a shame that we didn’t get to see the musicians much. I mean it is the point of on-stage musicals. 

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… Apparently they were doing the whole fucking show live tonight anyways for the audience, but they weren’t showing it because they didn’t want to show the actor in a wheelchair??? Fox is a bunch of assholes???

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Also, shoutout to Vanessa Hudgens, who was pretty much the only cast member who was clearly giving it 100% during the dress rehearsal. Made all the difference. I know it was meant to be a dress, but they still were performing in front of a live audience (and were probably also being filmed in case something like this happened), so cheers to sister not only being dedicated, but smart as hell to turn it on whenever it’s time to perform– no matter who’s watching.