It’s Not Just About The Show
Really, I only got Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent by Anthony Rapp because of the fact that he wrote it. I’ve been a fan of Rent for half of my life, so of course I would want to read the first hand account from my favorite OBC member. But I got a lot more than I bargained for.
“Anthony had a special feeling about Jonathan Larson’s rock musical from his first audition, so he was thrilled when he landed a starring role as film maker Mark Cohen. With his mom’s cancer in remission and a reason to quit his newly acquired job at Starbucks, his life was looking up.
When Rent opened to thunderous acclaim off-Broadway, Rapp and his fellow cast members that something truly extraordinary had taken shape. But even as his friends and family were celebrating the shows success, they were also mourning Jonathan Larson’s sudden death from an aortic aneurysm. By the time Rent made its triumphant jump to Broadway, Larson had posthumously won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. When Anthony’s mom began to lose her battle with cancer, he struggled to balance the demands of life in the theatre with his responsibility to his family. Here Anthony recounts the show’s magnificent success and his overwhelming loss. He also shares his first experiences discovering his sexuality, the tension it created with his mother, and his struggle into adulthood to gain her acceptance.
Variously marked by fledgling love and devastating loss, piercing frustration and powerful enlightenment, Without You charts the course of Rapp’s exhilarating journey with the cast and crew of Rent as well as the intimacies of his personal life behind the curtain.”
While the book does focus a lot on the sho, that’s not where it begins. You actually find out a lot about both the years before Rent and the years between Rapp leaving the stage production and starting to shoot the movie.
But the most important part of his book, to me, wasn’t the stuff about Rent like I thought it was going to be. Instead it was the stuff about his mother and her fight with breast cancer. That hit me hard, and it was written so well that as soon as I finished the book I turned to my mom and handed it to her, saying simply, “Read this. He explains exactly what I felt when you were fighting breast cancer.” Because that was true.
When she finished reading it she came and gave me a hug for it. She wasn’t quite as moved by it overall as I was, but she finally understood what being the child of someone going through that felt like.
This is a book for a lot of people. Theatre fans, people who have dealt with issues about sexuality, people who are dealing or who have dealt with cancer, doesn’t matter if they’re the ones going through it or if it’s someone they’re close to that’s going through it, the list goes in. It’s beautiful, funny, and heartbreaking.
