“It’s not how many years you live, but how you fulfill the time you spend here. That’s the sort of the point of the show.” -- Jonathan Larson (as told to the New York Times on the eve of the opening of Rent, two hours before his death)
An untapped desire to do something better and relevant struck me the night I saw the local production of “Rent”, directed by my friend Bobby Garcia at the RCBC Theater. Like my sisters and I, the people who saw it were fascinated by the raw exuberance of characters, reaching out no matter how strong their fears.The mood, the twists, and plots of the musical revolved around a group of friends, struggling young people in one of the most fast-paced city in the world – New York. They hold down numbing jobs to support their artistic dreams, while coping with life, survival, love, friendship, drugs, poverty, sexual confusion and AIDS.
Each of the characters had their moments – in high spirits, heartbreaking peril, victorious jiffy, what not. It is a 35-song score rock opera that loosely transposes the story of “La Boheme” to Manhattan’s present-day downtown bohemia, blending contemporary pop music with theater music. I personally thought it was something daring and experimental that broke the barriers of a typical Broadway play. It amazingly articulates the unspoken hopes and fears of society, moving audiences (like me) powerfully as they do with lyrics that make you ponder about how one must value his time in this borrowed life.
The impact is so enormous 'til this day that each time I hear the main theme song, Seasons of Love, being played it gives me the throat-aching feeling that takes me back to that breezy night in September when I watched the musical. It talks about how we measure the years in our life, how we put meaning to 525,600 minutes, an analysis on what the definition of time really is.
What is it really?! Is time the mere ticking of the clock, the moving of its hands? Is it the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds?
Upon seeing the opening act – a young, HIV positive punk rocker (played by Calvin Millado)sings of how he lives only for “one song, one glory, before I go”, the whole thing prompted me to research on the life of it’s creator. Such is the yearning of its lyrics’ cry that it would induce chills and even greater throat aching when I learned that its genius, a 35-year old author-composer-lyricist by the name of Jonathan Larson, had not lived long enough to see Rent’s very first run (gulp!).
On January 25, 1996, when it was no more than an experiment scheduled for a limited Broadway run, Larson watched the final dress rehearsal, went home and died unexpectedly of an aortic aneurysm. Just imagine the throbbing amount of emotion the entire cast and staff dealt with on its opening day! It can only sum to painful triumph.
The unspeakable sad story of Larson’s death on the eve of the triumph for which he had hungered all his life gave even more meaning to the musical (double gulp!). With continued interest, I later on learned how he had sacrificed his life to his work, waiting on tables for years, writing for Sesame Street and Land Before Time at one point, sustaining himself with the “sunny thought” that his talent would one day lead to his breakthrough. It did, only he was gone.
As I write this piece about the relevance of time, my friend Anthony Pangilinan, has commissioned me to mount a presscon and do publicity work to promote his brainchild, a Time Check Planner (talk about coincidence) after 15 years of conducting time management seminars. In its pages, he shares that no one has “more” or “less” time. We all have the same time and we choose to put it where we want to 24 hours a day, 12 months a year. And whether you’re the president of the most powerful nation in this world or a beggar on the street, no one is blessed with “more time”.
I come to realize that time is all about the capacity to love knowing that despite our borrowed moments, it’s really the size of our spirit and how we choose to spend it that matters. For my friend, time means achieving and maintaining momentous life balance, that he shares its real significance to society through his creative Timecheck Planner.
For Jonathan Larson, there was a prophetic urgency to squeeze as much as possible into what time remained of him that he put so much value to it with the staying power of his ceaseless outpouring of melody and song. With lyrics that struck me like thousands of thunder volts, it lingers, refusing to let anyone who hears his voice pay no attention to time and abandon hope.
So, tell me, is time a mere ticking of the clock?
