★★★★☆
There have been some so-so revivals of Jonathan Larson’s game-changing requiem for New York’s bohemia over the past two decades but, oh boy, this electrifying 20th-anniversary production is not one of them. Lithe but grungy, sexy but sad, it’s a gorgeous celebration of this rock musical inspired by the opera La bohème. It was a smash on Broadway, a milder success in the West End, but its creator never tasted any of its success since he died of an aortic dissection the day before its first preview in New York in 1996.
If you haven’t seen the show before — and no, the South Park team’s simultaneously vicious and affectionate puppet send-up, Everyone Has Aids, doesn’t count — you could hardly find a better place to start. Anna Fleischle’s smoke-shrouded, scaffolded set summons up the downtown squat in which the would-be film-maker Mark (Billy Cullum) lives with his songwriter flatmate Roger (Ross Hunter, in full grunge-era hair and shorts and leggings), an HIV sufferer who lost his girlfriend to the disease. They agitate for a free ride from their former flatmate Benjamin (Javar La’Trail Parker), who has married into money and become their landlord as well as that of the endangered arts space next door.
We know that the tide of history is about to engulf this crowd, that downtown New York is now a place for boutiques, not freaks and geeks. And with all the issues and all the characters that Larson packs in, the narrative has more breadth than depth. Yet the music and the staging pull you along with them all the same. The crack ensemble move with grace in Lee Proud’s kinetic choreography. Phil Cornwell orchestrates a band that brings phenomenal flow to Larson’s lusciously chorded mix of grunge and Latin and everything in between.
Philippa Stefani is outstanding as Mimi, who starts out fearlessly writhing around high up on a moveable platform and ends up on the floor, looking properly broken. The athletic Layton Williams oozes charisma as the drag queen Angel. And all the cast sing persuasively in a story that becomes above all a celebration of seizing the day before that day gets seized from you. The director, Bruce Guthrie, had apparently never seen Rent on stage. That may be part of how he manages to present it with all the urgency and joy of a show that’s never been seen before.
Box office: 0844 2642140, to January 28. Touring to May 27. Details rentonstage.co.uk