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After a short, chequered lifespan during which it had the odd hit but never quite found its feet, the St James Theatre goes out on something reasonably close to a high for its final production before it rebrands as the Andrew Lloyd Webber-led The Other Palace.
Bruce Guthrie's revival of Jonathan Larson’s iconic musical ‘Rent’ has been the fastest selling show the theatre has ever staged, and even with a chunk of the run to go, tickets are like gold dust.
I caught up with it on possibly not the ideal performance – one leads (Mimi) was understudied and another (Collins) was taken ill during the interval and had to be replaced. Nonetheless, it’s entirely apparent that it’s tight, energetic, and performed with great enthusiasm. With the notable exception of Layton Williams’s magnificent, tragic turn as transvestite Angel, it feels like perhaps there’s a lack of standout turns here (not helped by the substitutions, obviously), but they are a great company, and tell Larson’s propulsive, kaleidoscopic story with tremendous pizzazz.
The problem I had with Guthrie’s revival is that it almost feels too studied and spot on, almost as much a homage to ‘Rent’ as a continuation of its journey. In the mid ’90s this was a brave and outrageous show that took the basic plot of Puccini’s ‘La Bohème’, relocated it to a wild, diverse pre-gentrification Manhattan, and daringly stacked it with gay and lesbian romances and couples of all sexualities grappling with the Aids epidemic. Coming off the back of a decade dominated by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s twee hits, it was genuinely revolutionary.
In 2016, though, much of it feels like a kitschey cliche. In part that’s inevitable – ‘Rent’s massive success and underlying earnestness has long made it ripe for parody (see the very naughty song ‘Everyone Has Aids’ from ‘Team America: World Police’). But here the almost ludicrously detailed early ’90s outfits and technology feel like they fetishistically preserve a sense of time and place, while the grungy Manhattan portrayed here is long long gone. A musical that was once predicated on being daringly now has faded into safe nostalgia.