Film version of the Pulitzer and Tony Award winning musical about Bohemians in the East Village of New York City struggling with life, love and AIDS.
Director: Chris Columbus
Stars: Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal, Rosario Dawson, Jesse L. Martin, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Idina Menzel, Tracie Thoms, Taye Diggs.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0294870/
28 songs in the Soundtracks, including 4 reprises; 26 Written by Jonathan Larson. Not listed: a brief quotation from Puccini's La boheme.
Although I know Puccini's La boheme pretty well now, that only helps me recognize the homage moments here, not to follow this story. This felt like too many characters of roughly equal importance. Perhaps I could have benefitted from reading a detailed synopsis beforehand. This has a lot of time singing songs, seemingly more than spoken dialog. Perhaps repeated viewing would help.
Interesting that 5 of the 7 principals were in the original stage cast a decade earlier.
After watching the doc'y on disc2, I appreciated more why there were so many characters: it was important to kill off enough of them to give us the feeling of the AIDS epidemic during the early 90s.
Rated 7.0 (45,702)
distr. Sony/Columbia, dir. Columbus; 6
