Theatre Tulsa: RENT
Tulsa Performing Arts Center, Liddy Doenges Theatre
November 15, 2025
I’ve always liked RENT, the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical written by Jonathan Larson. But I’m a late ‘90s baby and the anxieties of the AIDS epidemic were before my time, so I never felt like I understood it. I last watched the filmed version of the musical nearly 10 years ago, and since then, the world has gone through another pandemic. Walking into the Liddy Doenges Theatre on a Saturday afternoon, I foolishly wasn’t expecting a resurrection of phantom anxieties around contagion, the health of myself and my loved ones, and the general future. In Theatre Tulsa’s production, which had a sold-out run at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center last weekend, I felt like I was watching the musical for the first time.
RENT follows a group of artists who live in Manhattan's East Village at the height of the AIDS epidemic. They struggle to make ends meet while witnessing their world change with increasing homelessness, technological advances that threaten their craft, and a then-fatal disease that affects about half of the group (sound familiar?). Larson loosely based the musical on his own experience as a struggling artist in New York City, as well as on Puccini’s La Boheme, an opera that follows a friend group of poor artists who live in Paris in the 1830s.
RENT is very angsty, a mood amplified by its rock-opera style. Theatre Tulsa’s production design doubled down on this aesthetic. A black-painted, two-story set resembled a fire escape. The ensemble moved two large tables into several configurations throughout the show to make a door, a stage, and a long table (and runway) for one of the more well-known songs, “La Vie Boheme.” For most of the production, lighting designer Chris Porcelli kept the stage quite dark, especially in the scenes where Roger and Mark’s apartment loses power. During the songs, he found spots for fun effects to boost the feeling: roving spotlights during “Rent,” an electrical pole lit to look like a Christmas tree during act one, and a beautiful rainbow spectrum for the song “Seasons of Love.” Add a live, five-piece band on stage and it was impossible to escape from these characters’ big emotions.
Those emotions can make the musical a bit overdramatic, but directors Christy Stalcup and Joshua Terrones made it resonate by expertly casting some of Tulsa’s top talent. Leah Rose and Alexandria Moore were vocal powerhouses as the hot-and-cold sapphic couple Maureen and Joanna. Rose both demanded and earned my attention in Maureen’s big protest song “Over the Moon,” while Moore delivered riffs beautifully and effortlessly throughout the show, making her a highlight both as a soloist and a backing vocalist.