Caprice adds a comic touch

In a week when Baz Luhrmann's visually lavish, feveredly exotic version of Puccini's La Bohème has opened on Broadway, Jonathan Larson's infamous update, Rent, returns to London's West End boasting a solo-turn from Caprice involving skin-tight shocking-pink trousers and a suggestively hung cowbell. As Maureen, the lesbian lover of the divavoiced Joanne Jefferson (Wendy Mae Brown), she and her wardrobe bring a surreally comic note to this Nineties portrait of a Manhattan neighbourhood where both gay and straight inhabitants live in the shadow of Aids.

The landscape of Aids has become infinitely more complex since Larson (who died of an aortic aneurysm) first penned Rent, which is perhaps one reason that it is difficult to see why critics - including the New York Times's Frank Rich - originally celebrated this work as a thrilling musical with raw energy. Often the plot seems blighted by over-simplification and cliche, and the details of the various relationships are so elliptical that it is hard to feel the full power of what is at stake when an individual is forced both to savour and fear each month as their possible last.

This is not to dismiss an evening that can suddenly flare into life with heart-snaring songs such as the rousing La Vie Bohème or the devastatingly mournful Without You. Kentaur's two-tier, graffitied set provides an appropriately down-atheel backdrop for the diversely fated partnerships, whether it is Tom Collins (Mykal Rand) who is rescued after being beaten up, by Mig Ayesa's transvestite Angel, or Roger (Damien Flood) whose affair mirrors the central theme of La Bohème when he falls for Debbie Kurup's ballsy yet desperately ill Mimi.

Unfortunately directorial decisions, such as creating a Harry Potterish lookalike narrator, sap the power of this anthem to doomed youth. A sense of missed opportunity hangs over the stage.

Rent
Cert: cert12A