Rent Keeps Jonathan Larson’s East Village in 1990 and the Revival Is All the Better For It

Rent | Tom Stoppard Theatre until 29th May 2027

Rent is due, An excellent, grungy, rough-and-ready revival

Rent took a long time to arrive. In 1988, writer Billy Aronson conceived the idea of a modern La Bohème, and Jonathan Larson joined him as composer. Larson eventually took over the project, setting it in New York’s East Village. After development at New York Theatre Workshop, it opened Off-Broadway in February 1996, then moved to Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre that April.

Larson never saw any of it. He died suddenly, at age 35, from an aortic dissection in the early hours of January 25, 1996, the night before the first Off-Broadway preview. The show went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and four Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran on Broadway for twelve years and 5,123 performances. London first saw it at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1998. The current production at the Tom Stoppard Theatre, directed by Luke Sheppard, was first staged at the Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester in 2021 and has now moved to the West End.

It’s often said that Rent revolutionized musical theatre. I’m afraid it didn’t. That’s what they were saying at the time, but there were rock musicals before it, and there have been rock musicals since. This is an excellent, pretty well sung-through musical that uses rock and pop to tell its story, but it wasn’t a landmark in style. What it did, which was unusual, was to be contemporary. At its premiere, it was set only six years before its first performance, making it almost contemporary, very unusual for a musical. Now, of course, it’s a piece of history, and the circumstances surrounding Jonathan Larson have elevated it to mythical status.

The musical follows a year, from one Christmas Eve in 1989 to the next, in the lives of a group of young artists, musicians, and friends getting by in New York’s East Village in the early 1990s. There’s a wonderful song after the interval, “Seasons of Love,” which even people who haven’t seen the show may well know.

Mark is a filmmaker, and his flatmate Roger is an HIV-positive songwriter. Mimi is the dancer from downstairs. Collins and Angel fall in love, and Maureen and Joanne are caught in a stormy relationship. It’s very loosely based on Puccini’s La bohème, swapping the opera’s tuberculosis for HIV and AIDS. This year, it’s celebrating three decades, in a year of big milestones.

Gaten Matarazzo, from Stranger Things, plays Mark, and he is, in the words of Mel Brooks, ‘surprisingly good’. He has musical theatre pedigree, having played Gavroche on Broadway many years ago. I saw him a few years ago in Sweeney Todd on Broadway, when he was young Tobias, and he was excellent. He’s not only a good TV actor, he is an excellent musical theatre actor. Although his name may be bringing people in, this is firmly an ensemble piece, and his character Mark, who is primarily a narrator, at some points almost drifts into the background.

Travis Ross brings powerhouse vocals and grunge energy to Roger and is ably partnered by Alexa Lopez as Mimi. Both create flawed, believable characters struggling with loss, illness, and disease, as one lyric says, “where their own blood cells are betraying them.”

For me, though, the two standout performers were Billy Nevers as Collins and Jeevan Braich as Angel. Nevers’s delivery of the reprise of “I’ll Cover You” is raw and heartbreaking. Braich, whom I last saw in Rusty and Starlight Express, is quite wonderful here, creating a three-dimensional character rather than a caricature. Not only are his vocals exhilarating, but his physicality is equally brilliant, complete with an unexpected cartwheel.

Has it been modernized in any way? No. There was the awful Rent remix that tried to update it, and we had best not talk about that one. It is firmly set in its period and all the better for it. As we know with West Side Story, it takes place in that period, but it has contemporary resonances about love, creativity, living for today, and trying to make sense of a changing world. All of that is allowed to resonate now by keeping it firmly in its original period.

It is rough and ready around the edges, but that actually fits with the bohemian lifestyle and its message. It is grungy. The costumes are grungy. The set is in the square. If you can sit on stage, I think you can have a really good time because you’re up close and personal. I was in the stalls, and you also get a fantastic experience there. Seating people on stage is something they’re doing more and more now, and cynical me says the producer is asking how to get more people in because the Tom Stoppard Theatre isn’t that enormous. I don’t think it adds anything other than capacity, but it must be nice to be close.

It is a bit too long, and I reckon that if Jonathan Larson had lived, he would have shaped and shortened it a bit. There’s one song I refer to as “the mooing song,” the proper title of which is “Over the Moon.” This is meant to be a funny send-up of an avant-garde art piece, but even when I saw Idina Menzel do it, it’s not funny enough. I’m sure he would have worked on that.

A classic musical that resonates now just as much as it did when it was first premiered, in an excellent production with some fabulous performances.

Rent is celebrating thirty years with a revival at the Tom Stoppard Theatre, and Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things is surprisingly good as Mark. It didn’t revolutionise musicals, but it is an excellent one, firmly set in its period and all the better for it. It’s a bit too long, and rough and ready around the edges, but that suits the bohemian world it’s showing us.

EyeOnLondon would say go for the voices and the grunge, not for a production that’s found a way to fully smooth out Larson’s baggier second act.

For more London arts and culture, visit EyeOnLondon at eye-on-london.com.

[Image Credits | Pamela Raith]

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