The most recent American musical to have run for more than two years on Broadway is now here. Rent, a life-enhancing update of La Boheme, has just opened in London. It brings four men from the original cast and excellent they are, too. Anthony Rapp, commanding Mark is a budding film-maker; the appealing and vulnerable Adam Pascal is his friend Roger, an Aids-infected musician; Jesse L Martin is their friend Tom, another inhabitant of the house in which they live.
Best of all, in a part which easily could have been coarse and crude, is Wilson Jermaine Heredia as his lover, Angel, a transvestite in love with life, but who looses it with grace and dignity in a warm and sympathetic portrayal.
The action takes place over a calendar year during which Mark finds and looses Mimi, an S & M dancer who returns to him, miraculously from the dead. Mimi is Krysten Cummings - a fine dancer and excellent singer. Equally good is the kooki Maureen, Roger's ex-lover played by Jessica Tezier. There's a fine overall backing cast and I defy you to pick out who is British among them. The late Jonathan Larson's score is rock-influenced (but not too advanced) and includes some very hummable songs including the witty Tango Maureen, a big ballad, Seasons of Love, and the touching Without You.
The show gains an added poignancy as a result of the death of its composer/lyricist shortly before the first off-off Broadway performances. This, maybe the show for the nineties as Hair was for the seventies, but who can tell whether it will also turn out to be badly dated 20 years from now.
For the moment, however, Rent is an attractive, timely show, appositely situated at the original home of Hair in the seventies, the Shaftesbury Theatre.
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