In his West End debut Gaten Matarazzo reveals a fizzing talent for musical theatre.
True, as the beige-bedecked budding documentary maker Mark Cohen, the American Stranger Things is the straight-laced centre of this family of post-punk struggling artists (notwithstanding his Jewish mother and her very Jewish messages). Yet Matarazzo’s wise narrator is no less in command of this rock musical’s tender, high-voltage score.
This is the 30th anniversary year of both the death of the show’s composer Jonathan Larson and the birth of this, his first, fully staged musical. That the death came before the birth – in fact the night before the very first preview – adds an extra tragedy to a work already steeped in the stuff.
In a weird alignment it is also the 100th anniversary of Puccini’s La Boheme on which Larson based his work. Luke Sheppard’s incredibly well sung and staged production makes the almost inarguable case that the musical will be as permanent a fixture on the cultural landscape as the opera.
Instead of 19th century Paris we are in 1990s New York where the cold is just as biting but where the acronym that instils§ fear is not TB but AIDS. With his cine camera always at the ready Mark introduces the eight members of his family who from struggling singer songwriter Roger played by Travis Ross, to political performance artist Maureen (Lazy Violet) are each making their own counter cultural contribution to their world.
It is perhaps interesting that the names of the fictional characters here are far more conservative than those of the performers playing them. Is this because leading a transgressive life is easier than it was 30 years ago?
At any rate, because this revival arrives in the wake of the recent hard-working musical adaptation of Irving Walsh’s Trainspotting, which was published just three years before the world premiere of Rent, it is easy to see what makes Larson’s show a much more attractive proposition for the West End than Welsh’s.
Both have characters who live in the drug-addled underbelly of their respective cities. And in each, HIV stalks the characters like a modern-day plague. But whereas the Edinburgh-set story ultimately wants its audience to understand the hopelessness of the human condition, the New York tale is brimful of its city’s life-affirming and, through its composer, Jewish energy.
Less flatteringly you could also argue it is much more sentimental. Whereas Puccini’s consumptive seamstress Mimi dies, Larson’s version, an erotic dancer played in another stunning West End debut by American-Cuban performer Alexa Lopez, makes remarkable recovery. And even where death rips away the kind-hearted drag queen Angel (a terrific Jeavan Baich) her humanity lives on.
Larson is similarly immortal.
Rent
Tom Stoppard Theatre, London
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