Yes, yes, you’re rolling your eyes, you’re saying “enough, already with the RENT, Rebecca. We get it. You love RENT.”
All that is certainly true, but this is a post that is only tangentially about my favorite musical. It’s more about the power of social networking (another of my favorite things).
There was this huge caffufle about RENT last week. A new version of the show, which is cleaned up a little bit, taking out the heavy swearing and explicit bits (like “Contact”) has been specially created for High Schools to produce. One high school, Corona Del Mar in California, had it scheduled as thier spring production. Coincidentally, they’ve been having a few issues with homophobia, and the choice to produce RENT was probably deliberate.
The caffufle happened when the show got cancelled. The reaons are not entirely clear why, but there is some concern that the play was deemed, even in its less-spicy state, to be, well, too spicy. Cries of ‘homophobia!’ were heard, and a bunch of the students got the word out via social networking sites like Facebook and Bloggers.
It worked. There were stories in the LA Times, the NY Times, and lots and lots of blogs.
All’s well that ends well: the show is back on.
Let this be a lesson: don’t cross the kids. They know how to mobilize.