SOURCE: "Rent Is Brilliant and Messy All at Once," in The New York Times, February 25, 1996, sec. 2, pp. 5, 22.

[In the following review, the critic describes Rent as "a lot of things: brash, brilliant, sweet, canny and messy."]

It's odd to have joined the generations that talk about what "the young" are doing, saying and going through these days, and how that is reflected in art and entertainment. When Hair, the counterculture antiwar musical, opened to the late 60's, I was pleased but a little patronizing as well you always are when you're part of a subculture that suddenly goes mass culture. So I wonder what today's counterculture young think when they see themselves or a facsimile of themselves on stage in Rent, the rock opera of the 90's now playing at New York Theater Workshop.

What do they think of this portrait of avant-garde experiment and rock-bottom desperation on...