With a Strong Staging of ‘Rent,’ Art House Productions Levels Up

It was a fitting way for Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.) to celebrate a quarter-century of operation: with music, dancing, jokes, high-spiritedness, and a story about desperate young people determined to leave a mark on an indifferent world. It felt right that an arts institution founded in 2001 should pick a show associated with the very late 1990s. The theater moved around town for years before finding a permanent place in the Powerhouse Arts District. Themes of impermanence, economic uncertainty, perseverance in the face of obstacles, artistic integrity, and the imperative to create something beautiful right now, today, since tomorrow is never a given. To the Art House staff, all of those must have felt like coming home.

Yes, it had to be Rent. Nothing else would have suited this milestone birthday party. The 1996 musical, which will run at Art House Productions until October 18, is often remembered for its unusually frank treatment of its tragic elements, including poverty, homelessness, violence, drug addiction, HIV, and AIDS.

It is also a survivor’s tale. It tells the story of a resourceful bunch of renegade creators who seize and savor every moment before the sands of time run out. (They’d have fit in well at 111 First Street). It’s a show with no real villain except the clock — one full of shivers and intimations of doom, and animated by a fierce longing for community. Though it’s set in Alphabet City in the days before the neighborhood’s rapid upmarket climb, the relevance of the show to Jersey City in a time of financial crisis is almost too obvious to belabor.

So Art House Productions has convened its own group of talented misfits. Director and Art House theater manager Joshua M. Feder declined to sanitize the show. Instead, he compensated for the ugliness of some of the happenstance by coaxing compassionate performances from his actors. Feder’s cast poured on the camaraderie, touching, hugging, smooching when appropriate, and linking arms against fate. Art House Productions gallerist Andrea McKenna imparted CBGB-style chic to the set, covering the walls with show posters from the period and smothering the theater’s columns and risers with tags, throwies, and ACT UP graffiti. 

Click here for the full Jersey City Times review by Tris McCall