Rent: on stage: on screen

WAY before the movie version of Rent came out, My wife and I pined for them to release the musical filmed live on broadway - as if we were sitting in the audience. I was happy when I heard it was coming to film, but I didn't want to see a movie version of it, I wanted to see what everyone else would see if they saw it on Broadway. They did this with the musical Cats and it turned out phenominally!

Well, I never saw the movie version, but we were fortunate enough to see it live on stage a few months ago at the Toyota Center when it came through Tri-Cities. Happy with that, I then learned they did film the final show on Broadway and turned *that* performance into exactly what we've been wanting for the last 7 years.

It's in select theaters for a small amount of time (only over the weekend). It costed $20 per ticket, but it was Completely worth it to see it again "on stage."

We bought our tickets, had our babysitter (a.k.a., her mom) watch the kids as we sat in an empty theater all to ourselves. Right before it started, some elderly couple came in as well... Like any movie, it started with 20 minutes of previews... which I actually thought was odd since this wasn't like the other "movies" in the theater.

Then, it started. Not Rent, but Death Race. The What?! The eldery couple got up to complain and left! I started walking to where they were, told them what happened as they were aware and said it'd start in about 2 minutes and apologized for the accident.

I can't wait until it comes out on video, but it's one of those situations as well where the lead character, Mark Cohen, looked *exactly* like our good friend Shawn so, unfortunately, I saw Shawn instead of Mark the entire time. (picture below) Eh, it's all good.

It's a comfort to know that if I didn't get the chance to watch it live on stage, at least I would've seen this one. And we had the whole theater to ourselves. ROCK!!