Blogocentric Formulations

There's only this, forget regret, or life is yours to miss

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DAY 24

Song: "Another Day"
Artist: Jonathan Larson (writer), Roger, Mimi, & Company (singing parts)
Album: Rent (1996, opening of first broadway run)

Rent was the first musical that I'd ever seen performed live. I'd taken theater classes in high school and college, but the content of the stuff I saw in those classes was always dramatic or comedic in nature; it wasn't until I was my later college years and my wife (then girlfriend) and I were both living in Los Angeles that she first took me to see a musical. We couldn't afford anything fancy at the time, what with being poor college students and all, but we got dressed up and had dinner at an affordable restaurant before climbing up to the nosebleed seats at the very top of the theater.

Thankfully, this musical isn't exactly heavy on the visuals (Now Wicked, on the other hand, that's a visually-impressive musical!), so it didn't really matter where we sat. We could sit up at the top and squint down at the stage to figure out which character was which, but the part that really impressed me the most was the singing. It wasn't just pointless songs; these were resonant lyrics and topical themes that an audience could understand. I'm just a little too young to have been aware of the HIV/AIDS panic in the 1980s and early 1990s, but there's enough disease and poverty in this world that I think the subject matter is topical even today.

The whole musical is full of wonderful songs and lyrics, but the song that really resonated with me the most (other than the familiar "Seasons of Love") is this one where Roger expresses his conflicted feelings for Mimi. If you haven't seen the musical, I highly recommend it... and even if musicals aren't your think, the original broadway cast recording (or heck, even the soundtrack to the movie) is well worth listening to for this song and quite a few others.