Rent review – Gaten Matarazzo succeeds but his co-stars dazzle in a rock-solid musical revival

Increasingly, Hollywood actors seem to arrive on London’s theatre scene to a blare of look-at-me fanfare: through press releases and tube posters, we are made acutely aware that these are big fishes splashing around in our somewhat smaller pond. For Gaten Matarazzo, there was no real splashing to speak of. When it was announced earlier this year that Jonathan Larson’s seminal rock musical Rent was returning to the West End after nearly three decades, the casting of 24-year-old Stranger Things star Matarazzo was never really pushed as the selling point. No, the big draw here is the material: a chance to see what has proven to be one of the most enduring musicals in decades, staged with a careful fidelity to its origins.

Here at the Tom Stoppard Theatre (recently renamed from the Duke of York’s), Matarazzo is Mark, budding filmmaker and somewhat nebbishy hanger-on to New York’s young, queer, bohemian milieu. It is Christmastime in the height of the AIDs crisis, and the virus has already torn through this social set: at the start of the play, several characters are already HIV positive, including the scared, pugnacious musician Roger (Travis Ross), and Mimi (Alexa Lopez), a troubled, vulnerable stripper with a drug problem. As Roger and Mimi indulge a fraught will-they/won’t-they/oh-for-the-love-of-God-just-do-it-already courtship, we see an easier, kinder love affair develop between gentle giant Collins (Billy Nevers) and Angel (Jeevan Braich), a flamboyant drag queen, both of whom have AIDs.

When Rent came out, it was transgressive in its candour, particularly in its handling of issues around AIDs; in the years since, this has almost become a reductive pigeonholing. In the puppet satire Team America: World Police, it was lampooned with the musical number “Everyone Has AIDS” – crass, yes, but indicative of just how Rent was perceived by the wider. Thirty years on from its original debut, though, it’s remarkable just how relevant the production still feels in places, how unlike anything else on stage at the moment. Even this year’s musical Pride, which explores similar themes and owes some of its DNA to Rent, feels less striking, less urgent.

It works, then, that Luke Sheppard’s production opts to reiterate more than reimagine, in everything down to the costumes (designed by Gabriella Slade, they have that familiar shabby, chic Rent look). There have been some technological advances since its original staging in 1993 – a judiciously used rotating floor works wonders as Ross sings the mournful “One Song Glory” early on, while live footage from Mark’s video camera is frequently fed through live to a constellation of retro TV screens dotted around the peripheries. But by and large, this is Rent as you’ve seen it before; the musical’s fresh relevance is supplied, by the audience, and the changed world that lurks outside the theatre.

Matarazzo doesn’t quite shine here, but it’s a hard role to shine. Mark is inherently, constitutionally passive, serving mostly as an outside observer and conduit for the audience. The former child star is affable and slightly dweeby in the role – there are shades of a young, pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander – and sings well, though most of the other singers here, particularly Ross, Braich, and Nevers, are absolutely exceptional.

Larson’s death – at the age of 35, the day of Rent’s first preview – has always cast a strange light over this musical’s legacy. Unlike many of his characters, Larson did not know he was destined to die young (he didn’t have AIDs, but died suddenly, of a cardiovascular malfunction known as an aortic dissection), but he seemed to write as if he knew his time was up. Rent is a musical about finding ways to live life in the shadow of death – a theme that is, at the end of the day, universal. At the end of the day, the big question facing a revival like this is whether it can fundamentally justify its own existence. Rent manages that, and then some.

‘Rent’ is at the Tom Stoppard Theatre until May 2027