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 nebbish hanger-on to New York’s young, queer, bohemian milieu. It is Christmas time 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.