It was only to be expected that The New York Times would fall madly in love with Rent, the “rock opera” that—with no little help from the Times itself—is turning out to be this season’s biggest and most bogus theatrical sensation. After all, any WORK THAT COMBINES ROCK MUSIC AND AIDS and drug addicts and a multiracial cast and one star who plays a lesbian performance artist AND ANOTHER WHO PLAYS AN HIV-positive transvestite sculptor is calculated to spark a lot of heavy breathing at the Times’s culture desk. Add to this a story line “updated” from Puccini’s La Bohème—but transposed to Manhattan’s Lower East Side for “realism”—and you have a mixture that is irresistible to anyone who prefers his sensationalistic trash overlaid with a few rhinestones of “culture.”

This winning combi ...

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