Rent: Emotional RENT has it all

Director Scott Andrew no doubt understands the rewards of a RENT production and the reverse.

Back in 2008 he directed and played one of the roles.

With use of a bigger stage and one or two former cast members back to reprise their role from 2008, this production is well worth seeing.

Writer and lyricist Larson bases RENT on Puccini's La Boheme. The opera is set round the 18402 within the Latin quarter of Paris - young artists living in rundown garrets, struggling with emploment, poverty, discrimination and, of course, disease.

Back then there was no cure from the deadly tuberculosis (TB - sometimes referred to as consumption).

The more contemporary RENT uses a bleak set arranged around plenty of industrial props in a rundown building in New York's East Village.

The players are struggling young artists dealing with employment, poverty, discrimination and disease (this time it is AIDS).

A focused and highly talented cast give everything to tell the story of this emotionally-charged show.

Many in the audience would have run a gauntlet of feelings; perhaps enthusiastic clapping at the end of a song/dance number, silent and pitiful tears at wasted life, frustration and anger at discrimination.

Yet it is love and hope that wraps and threads through the storyline. Hopes and dreams found and lost from one Christmas Eve to another.

Sadly, the night before this show first opened off Broadway in 1996, Larson died of an aneurism. He would not get to see the overwhelming reaction to his contemporary musical.