Song and strife

Without You is a show that requires a bit of prior explanation. However, if you’re a gay jobless thesp living in New York in 1994, and your Mom’s dying of cancer back home in Illinois, and you’ve landed a role in Rent, a new musical about Aids, then you’re already up to speed. You have all the data required. In fact, you’re probably Anthony Rapp, the author of this musical autobiography which has just arrived from Edinburgh.

Rapp tells two tales through narrative and song. First we hear about Rent which, you may be aware, is a smash-hit musical based on La bohème and relocated to New York during the HIV epidemic. This house-move intensifies its kitsch morbidity by a factor of about a thousand. Rent is an epic cheek-streamer, a duct-dripping sob-fest, a mawkish deluge of grief and anguish. (I refer to the storyline, by the way. The melodies are soaring little miracles of tuneful wonderment.) To make Rent even weepier, its author, Jonathan Larson, managed to die of an Aids-related lurgy just before the show’s off-Broadway première. Fans of the musical will be intrigued to hear Rapp’s back-stage recollections and his memories of its doomed creator.

Having dealt with that, he moves on to his expiring Mom. She’s a plucky old soul and she names her growth ‘Wild Bill’, as if it were some treasured but unreliable possession, like a parrot or vintage car or a low-yielding plum tree. The tumour has plans to diversify however, and soon it’s opening branch operations in all her major organs. Mom ain’t got long to linger. Rapp at first finds her demise a bit of a drag on his career. Then he realises that it might make great material for a box-office smash.