Pros: Excellent variety, soft love songs and emotional hard rock. Meaningful story to be told.
Cons: Weighty issues not for younger audiences.
The Bottom Line: The moral is, live each day like it's your last. Show extra love and care wherever you can. A reminder of how precious the gift of life is.
soulkissed2003's Full Review: Rent [Original Soundtrack] by Original Soundtrack
RENT is the story of a year in the life of friends. All live in Greenwich Village in New York City, and all are touched by their new friend Angel, a gay man who shows them all the importance of sharing love with everyone you come in contact with. Despite the ups and downs in these friends' relationships over the year, the thought of Angel holds them all together in the end.
The songs on this exciting soundtrack tell the story well, even if you have not seen the Broadway production or the recently released DVD movie, in which most of the original Broadway actors perform. The story was written by a creative young man who wanted to not only give us a great work of art, but also to focus on the issue of living with AIDS, an issue often hushed in our society.
The opening song, "Seasons of Love" is basically the theme song of the story. It is melodic but spirited. "Rent" shares that the story is not just about the struggle of paying the bills, but also the emotional struggles in life that leave us "rent" inside. As the music goes on, there is a good balance of slow versus speedier songs. The character of Roger gives an element of rock opera to the performances -- he is a struggling guitarist looking to write one last great love song.
Maureen is a complicated and spur-of-the-moment character that brings some humor to the tale, as expressed through "The Tango Maureen" and later her protest song at the end of Disc One.
Disc Two starts out a little racier with "La Vie Boheme" (my favorite song on this recording), but the story begins to wind down as the friends' relationships slowly begin to fall apart, culminating with Angel's death. The music reveals the change in mood, as this disc is much more sedate, much more sorrowful. Each character hits rock bottom in their own way, before the memory of Angel finally reunites them again in the end.
I have replayed both sides to this soundtrack many times in my car, and my kids enjoy some of the songs as well and can sing along, although I do skip over some of the more adult issues when they're listening, as they are still young. As they get older the soundtrack will help make a good jumping point to start a conversation about some tough issues that are out there in today's world.
One of the longest-running shows (since 1996) in the history of Broadway, and one of its most beloved, RENT was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for D...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
![Rent [Original Soundtrack] by Original Soundtrack](http://di2.shopping.com/images1/pi/c3/d4/8b/2004536908-177x150-0-0.jpg)
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.