‘Rent’ at the Wood: They’re fearless, thank our lucky stars

Chronicle Managing Editor Cathy DeDe opines: Fearless, fully committed, saucy — the young adults of Glens Falls have taken over the stage and made it SING with their true-to-heart production of the Jonathan Larson musical Rent. It opened last weekend and continues this week at the Wood Theater in downtown.

Urban, gritty, soul-wrecking, loving, exuberant and flipped-out. It’s righteously bold, and bawdy — be warned — as is well and appropriate for the original 1996 rock musical opera that upended Broadway when it leapt almost instantly from the New York Theatre Workshop to the big lights.

Note, with admiration: This is a Glens Falls Community Theatre production, not staid even in its 90th year.

The cast sparkles, they play the roughest stuff for their hometown with twinkles in their eyes — or perhaps, they just don’t care, and shouldn’t.

The gritty set is befitting its time: New York City at the new millennium, artist communities ravaged by the bleak reality of AIDS, seeking meaning, questioning everything, living large, and scared.

Olivia Dybas, a force on stage since she was about 8 years old, gives the sexy-comic performance of her young lifetime as Maureen. She puts everything especially into the character’s wildly perplexing performance art piece, somehow making the ridiculous sublime.

But it’s the full ensemble that blows the roof off the Wood Theater: Aidan Wright as rock star Roger, Josh Willis as the filmmaker Mark, Olivia Barcomb as troubled Mimi, Mark Trapasso and Kevin Trapasso as loving partners Angel and Tom Collins, Grace Davis as Maureen’s hapless lover Joanne, and Prince Massie as the turncoat yuppie Ben.

The supporting cast offers killer solos and tasty character-driven moments. The rock band, mostly off stage: Wow.

Credit to director Trent Sano.

Rent continues Thursday to Saturday, with an added matinee at noon Saturday to make up for a storm closing last week. Details on these pages and at woodtheater.org.

Here’s an opportunity, also, to right an egregious wrong done to Cabaret: Last June, young grown-up members of the Broadway Upstate troupe gave us an equally fearless, committed, all-in production of that dark musical at the Sandy Hill Arts Center in Hudson Falls.

Raw, human, beautiful and appropriately grotesque, with Michael Nichols-Pate in the central role of Emcee and Helen Annely as Sally Bowles — this Cabaret at its powerful, unflinching conclusion stunned the audience into silence, then applause. Somehow I let slip the chance to say so in writing.

Besides the memorable performances in both these cases, I can’t emphasize enough how I value the opportunity people in their 20s and 30s are carving out to live and work here, to be part of the community, to make theater that matters — on their own and with longstanding existing companies. We’re lucky.

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