Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer-winning rock musical, which moves La Bohème to New York’s East Village, returns to the West End in the round, with Gaten Matarazzo as Mark.
Luke Sheppard, director of & Juliet, stages Jonathan Larson’s RENT at the Tom Stoppard Theatre in Covent Garden from Saturday 26 September 2026 to Saturday 29 May 2027. Gaten Matarazzo of Stranger Things plays Mark.
Larson wrote the music, lyrics and book, moving Puccini’s La Bohème of 1896 to the East Village of the early 1990s. Its circle of young artists live under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.
The playwright Billy Aronson began the idea in 1988, and Larson took it on as his own in 1991. He died of an aortic dissection the night before the first off-Broadway performance, at New York Theatre Workshop on 26 January 1996.
RENT moved to Broadway that April, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical, and ran there for 12 years. London first saw it in the West End in 1998.
Sheppard, who also directed Paddington The Musical, reconfigures the house in the round. The theatre opened in 1892 as the Trafalgar Square Theatre and took Stoppard’s name in September 2026.
Travis Ross plays Roger and Alexa Lopez plays Mimi.