The highly-anticipated musical event ‘Rent Live’ aired Sunday on Fox, and things got complicated.
The beloved musical’s story and message were over-shadowed by a cast injury that prevented most of the production from being live at all. Brennin Hunt, who played Roger, a major lead character, broke his ankle in the last dress rehearsal. The staging was complicated and involved a massive multi-level set, which meant that Hunt would not be able to do everything the performance required of him for the live performance.
As a result, Fox decided to air the dress rehearsal from the night before for the majority of the performance, with just the ending being live. The big finale included visits from all of the original Broadway cast and had not been part of the pre-recorded rehearsal.
It’s normal for performers to hold back a little in rehearsals to save their energy and voice for the main event, which means that the performances audiences saw were not fully up to par. A lot of fans were upset with the development, especially after word got out that a live performance had in fact taken place, but that only the studio audience got to see it.
The fact is that injuries happen. Broadway has had a solution for this problem for decades: understudies. There is no reason why a live TV performance should not have the same built-in precautions that a stage version has. And now the producers know exactly why.
Not all of the response was negative, of course. Many of the performances lived up to the hype, and many fans were quite pleased. Nothing live is going to be perfect – that’s just part of the unpredictable magic of theater. It’s easy for us to criticize, but the fact is that it was still an amazing feat of creativity that in large part did justice to the legacy of a major cultural artifact.
