Rent Review - September 2026

Jonathan Larson's landmark rock musical returns for its 30th anniversary, with Stranger Things' Gaten Matarazzo leading a bold new production at the Duke of York's Theatre. Here is our review.

29 September 2026 4 min read

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★★★★☆ · Duke of York’s Theatre, London · Booking until 27 March 2027

Thirty years on, Rent still feels like a show with its heart wide open. Jonathan Larson’s rock musical has arrived back in the West End in a bold new anniversary production at the Duke of York’s Theatre, and the thing that strikes you most is how little of its urgency has faded. “No day but today” is as much a dare as it ever was, and this staging takes the dare seriously.

For anyone meeting it for the first time, Rent follows a year in the lives of a group of young artists and friends in New York’s East Village, chasing love, art and connection while living under the shadow of HIV and AIDS. Loosely inspired by Puccini’s La Boheme, it measures that year not in minutes but, famously, in seasons of love. It is a story about chosen family, about making something while you still can, and about the people who hold you up when everything else is falling away.

The score that changed everything

The reason Rent endures is, first and last, the score. From the opening title number to the soaring communal hymn of “Seasons of Love”, Larson reshaped what a musical could sound like, fusing rock, pop and a genuine Broadway heart into songs that still land with full force. “One Song Glory”, “Light My Candle”, “Take Me or Leave Me” and the riotous “La Vie Boheme” are among the most quoted numbers in modern musical theatre, and hearing them performed live, with a proper band driving them, is a reminder of why. It is a sung-through, emotionally direct piece, and when the music is this strong it carries you a very long way.

Gaten Matarazzo as Mark

The headline casting is a real coup. Gaten Matarazzo, known to millions as Dustin in Stranger Things, takes the role of Mark, the aspiring filmmaker who documents the lives of those around him and, in doing so, keeps the whole story in frame. It is smart casting: Mark is the watcher, the one slightly outside the action, and a screen actor who has grown up in front of a camera brings an easy, grounded presence to a character defined by what he chooses to record. Having a genuine screen star at the centre will draw in audiences who might never otherwise book a ticket to a thirty-year-old musical, and that is no bad thing for a show that has always been about reaching people.

A production for the anniversary

Luke Sheppard, whose recent credits include & Juliet and Paddington The Musical, directs, and he is a canny choice for an anniversary revival that needs to honour the original without embalming it. The ambition here is to make Rent feel present rather than preserved, to let a new generation find themselves in it, and the staging leans into the raw, lived-in energy that the piece demands. This is a production that wants you to feel the heat of the Village, the cold of the winter, and the warmth of the people trying to keep each other going through both.

Why Rent still matters

What lingers, in the end, is not the spectacle but the sentiment. Rent was written at a moment of real loss, and its insistence on living fully in the present, on loving loudly while you can, still carries an emotional charge that few musicals match. It is bittersweet rather than bleak: there is heartbreak in it, but its whole message is about joy and connection, and audiences tend to leave uplifted as much as tearful. Three decades on, in a brand new staging with a screen star at its centre, that message feels well worth hearing again.