Paying the ‘Rent’ Can Be Easy, Hard

“Rent” is a mega-hit musical about romantic and artistic young down-but-not-outers trying to get their acts together while living as squatters in an inhospitable New York City tenement.

The most down and nearly out among them are Roger Davis, an ex-junkie, HIV-positive rock musician who has grown withdrawn after his girlfriend’s suicide, and Mimi Marquez, an HIV-positive exotic dancer whose smack craving still rules.

The wary Roger and the sassy-yet-vulnerable Mimi are drawn to each other. But can true love walk through the valley of the shadow of death--not to mention the shadow of distrust Roger feels because of Mimi’s drug habit?

Cary Shields, who plays Roger in the touring company of “Rent” that opens a weeklong stand tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, took the royal road into his character’s predicament. One audition, one callback and--bang--he had the part.

It was quite a turnabout for an unknown Canadian rock singer who had never acted, had never sung in a musical and who was at the time crashing on his mother’s couch in Toronto with not even a glimmer of an ambition of seeking a gig in a Broadway show.

Dominique Roy, in contrast, took a long and winding path to her featured part as Mimi. The Montreal-raised actress had to audition repeatedly over a long period to win a spot in the Canadian “Rent” company--and then only as a pinch-hitting standby and member of the chorus. She has been with the show three years in Canada, on tour and on Broadway, but won her promotion to playing Mimi only a month ago.

In “Rent”--which earned creator Jonathan Larson a posthumous Pulitzer for drama in 1996 (he died of a heart aneurysm on the eve of the off-Broadway opening)--parents are an unseen, unwanted presence. They clutter the answering machines of their artistically and politically committed bohemian offspring with clueless advice and admonitions phoned in from the hopelessly bourgeois suburbs.

But Shields was the clueless one, and his mom the trailblazer, in turning him into a prominent performer in “Rent.”

It was nearly three years ago. Shields, now 26, had returned to Toronto after a divorce and a period of beach-bumming in Mexico. The rock band he fronted, Thieves Crossing, was little-known. The only semi-steady job he’d ever had was as a building superintendent, and he hated it. He had no immediate prospects of getting another one.

Enter Mom, who without telling him wrote a letter requesting an audition for “Rent,” forged her son’s signature on it and sent it to the producers, who were holding casting calls in Toronto.

When the invitation came, Shields said, “She drove me down and walked me in, essentially. I was totally unprepared, of course.”

However, “Rent” was one of two musicals that Shields, a fan of the Who and U2, had ever seen. Unlike the other one, “Les Miserables,” it had affected him.

“I was amazed that theater could be like that, that somebody had written something that was of interest to me,” he said of his first impression upon seeing the show during a 1997 trip to New York. “Particularly Roger’s story, about a musician who was sitting around at home doing nothing all the time.”

Shields belted out “One Song Glory,” the number proclaiming Roger’s quest to write a single great song before he dies. Soon, he was packing off to Tampa, Fla., for his “Rent” debut.

“For a while, it was about trying to get behind what I was singing and standing in the right place,” he recalled from Scranton, Pa. But in the course of on-and-off touring the last three years in various “Rent” companies, Shields said, “I’ve felt more adventurous in terms of acting and gone out on that limb.”

He gets to play his guitar a bit in the show and a lot during his free time on the road; his plan after the current tour ends is to hunker down in Los Angeles and launch a rock-funk-jazz band called Poncho with “Rent” alumnus Mark Leroy Jackson. They aim to feature the band in “Lucky,” a rock musical they are writing about people caught up in a 21st century revolutionary political struggle.

Roy and Shields are a mutual-admiration society of fellow Canadians. No hard feelings, Roy said, that her onstage love interest had such a rapid ascent to “Rent” stardom, while hers has been so slow.

She was born in Haiti and arrived as an infant in Montreal with her mother. Dance was her first love. A stay in New York during her teens convinced her she would also need to act to have a future. Singing was the hardest part: “Every time I would audition, I would nail the dancing, but the singing, I was just terrified.

“The first time I had to sing on Broadway, I wanted to bury myself right on stage,” she continued, recalling a standby appearance as a soloing bag lady in “Rent.”

Now, after regular voice studies, she is confident.

“When you care about something very much, you know you can do it,” Roy said. “You’re really scared to take that first step, but you know you will some day.”

At 31, she has no regrets that her rise has been at a snail’s pace.

“There’s something very powerful and very rich about being able to work for what you want,” she said, speaking from a tour stop in St. Louis. “If you have to go around difficulties and work harder than the next person, you always gain something.”

SHOW TIMES

“Rent,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. Through Sunday. $22-$53.50, with 36 front-row tickets available on a first-come, cash-only basis two hours before each performance. (714) 556-2787.