Rent anniversary is celebrated in style

Rent, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff

WHEN Jonathan Larson wrote the embryonic draft of Rent in 1992 he wanted to create a new musical which would update Puccini’s La Boheme.

He also wanted to write a show about his friends – young people struggling to live in New York’s downtown.

When it was finally staged four years later in 1996, Larson had tragically died from an aortic aneurysm, aged 35, after witnessing the final dress rehearsal of the show that would forever enshrine his name in music history.

Although the show deals with the spectre of the Aids epidemic of the time, many of its themes are relevant today: growing up, sexual orientation, gender identity, drug use, poverty, homelessness, and political rebellion.

And it’s that generational resonance that keeps people young and old returning to renew their love of – or to discover for the first time – this most human of musicals.

This 20th anniversary update of Rent, directed by Bruce Guthrie, somehow manages to take it beyond the realm of its own lofty achievement with a production that is a glorious life-affirming, spectacle.

Both breathless and breathtaking, it will make you laugh, cry and experience every emotion in between.

The production courses with the vitality and the exuberance of youth, containing songs that will make your heart sing and wring you dry, routines that will bring you to your feet and make you want to dance on your seat.

The ensemble cast are pinpoint perfect. Welsh singer Lucie Jones, who you may never look at in the same light again, is a kooky revelation as Maureen while Angel, played by Layton Williams, is dazzling in voice, style and limber physicality. Director Guthrie proves that he is unquestionably the spiritual heir to Jonathan Larson in the evident love and passion he harbours for the show.

If every Monday evening was as good as this you’d go to bed Sunday yearning to wake up the next day.

Scarcely has a standing ovation been more deserved. Rent is at the WMC until April 8. Kathryn Williams