FEATURED IN THE NEWS:
"Arespacochaga and choreographer Dionysia Williams (and costume designer Tonya Marie) don’t shy away from setting this Rent in place and time, but they also don’t overstate it. They lean into the parts of this story that resonated as deeply with Puccini and his librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa in the 1890s as with Larson a century later as with audiences a quarter century after Rent’s original production: the hunger for a sense of community, the way that community almost inevitably shifts in your late 20s into something else, and the paths we take in growing up, as we try to figure out what the core aspects of our personalities are.
The relatively large core cast and additional eight-person chorus filling in the supporting characters that populate the play’s universe can make the stage feel claustrophobic. Arespacochaga beautifully avoids that – using every inch of Jason Bolen’s stunning, two-tiered set to drive home when characters are interacting in different locations, in different headspaces, or ducked away from the main action. She uses the sense of claustrophobia, people stepping on one another and getting on their nerves when the plot demands it, but her production emphasizes that sense of wide open possibility, even in the shadow of death, the wonder and joy of the moment and embracing what it has to offer."
— RICHARD SANFORD, Columbus Underground, 07 October 2022