Rent

Let's start from the end: the beauty of catching the final performance of a stage show is, besides the fact that everything runs like clockwork and every dynamic of the production has been polished to perfection, being able to sense, almost without trying, the emotion that each member of the cast shares with their fellow performers during the closing bows.

In the case of "Rent – No day but today", even the ever-brash Paolo Ruffini, the musical's director, has to hold back a tear or two by the end of the final performance — understandably, given the close of a journey that began in July 2009 and ended in his hometown of Livorno, which, as it has for years now, gave him an extraordinary welcome.

Let's take a step back: "Rent", Jonathan Larson's multi-award-winning rock musical inspired by Puccini's "La Bohème", tells the story of a group of penniless young artists trying to get by, caught between artistic ambition and the spectre of AIDS, in the New York underground scene of the 1990s. It's a hymn to diversity as richness and to being different as a virtue, one that Ruffini — once again showing his interest in social and current affairs — has reworked and made his own: in the musical staged at the Teatro Quattro Mori in Livorno there's also room for a few forays into Livorno-style sarcasm, with an eye on Italy today.

"Rent" is first and foremost a rock opera, in which the musicians playing live carry just as much weight as the actors in the cast: among the latter are a few names familiar to fans of the Italian musical theatre scene, such as Gianluca Spatti, assistant director and a terrific actor in the role of the drag queen Angel, and Marco Gandolfi Vannini — formerly Casanova in Ballerini's "Il giovane Casanova", formerly Ren McCormack in Rossi Castaldi's "Footloose", formerly many other things — excellent here in "Rent", playing the drug-addicted rocker Roger.

The show's sets are minimal, the choreography isn't overly elaborate but is nonetheless thoroughly effective: this is a production that seems to lack nothing, thanks in no small part to the skill of Ruffini and his wife Claudia Campolongo, the project's artistic director and an actress herself, who have put together a cast of experienced performers and new faces, alongside a band of six outstanding musicians and a top-tier production and organisational staff.

The emotion felt even by someone like myself, who has never been much of a fan of musical theatre, is likely the same emotion that drove the artists involved in "Rent", just as the feeling is shared between actors and audience alike at having, respectively, put on and witnessed a smart, well-made show: that alone is enough to call Ruffini and his musical a success.

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