Rent

Published Tuesday 16 October 2007 at 11:45 by Mark Shenton

Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer-prize winning 1996 musical phenomenon Rent has had two previous West End outings, first when Michael Greif’s original New York staging transferred to the Shaftesbury in 1998 and then when Paul Kerryson’s touring production played two seasons at the Prince of Wales in 2001-2. But it has never been a sustained success here, even though the original production is still running on Broadway. So will it prove third time lucky for the show as it now returns in a “remixed” version that marks it out not so much as a revival as a revisal?

Pop stylist and creative director William Baker turned debutant theatre director has taken a flawed show and turned it into a floor show: he has removed the grunge and grit and replaced it with the glossy sheen of magazine-supplement stylishness. The pervasive aesthetic of Mark Bailey’s two-tier set (upper level entirely obscured from the rear stalls) is of a minimalist white room.

It’s an approach that removes the specifics of time and place that informed Rent, originally set among bohemian New Yorkers living on the edge in downtown mid-nineties Manhattan, and seeks to universalise it. Three Brits are now among them, but just as the danger has largely gone out of New York itself, so has the sense of danger of this show. The all-pervasive precariousness of lives being led in the shadow of the HIV virus is also now, in the age of combination therapies, not quite the same either, though the production nods towards its casualties in a shamelessly manipulative dot-matrix roll-call of those who died thanks to it.

Instead the show becomes, paradoxically, a jaunty cabaret celebration of life. Though it’s still a fault of the writing to fail to delineate relationships clearly enough, it is not helped by a production here that is all show and no tell. Even Larson’s punchy songs have been re-ordered and re-orchestrated, so there were times when I felt I was back at the Pet Shop Boys musical Closer to Heaven with the pulsing electronic beats that have been put into them.

But even if this production has amplified, in every sense, some of the problems of the show, it has also given it the hands-down (and up) sexiest cast in London, who go to town with shameless attack. Former Sugababe Siobhan Donaghy brings an appealing combination of vulnerability and vocal strength in her theatrical debut as Mimi, who falls in love with Luke Evans’ soulful Roger. Leon Lopez’s Collins and Jay Webb’s Angel make another sassy, sexy coupling and Denise Van Outen steals the show with her strapping appearance as Maureen.