Thirty years on, Rent returns to the West End in a new production, with Gaten Matarazzo making his West End debut. Here is everything you need to know before you book.
Rent opens at the Tom Stoppard Theatre on Saturday 26 September 2026. It is a brand-new staging of Jonathan Larson’s rock musical – the show that rewrote what a Broadway musical could sound like – and it books through to March 2027. The hook is a familiar face in an unfamiliar place: Gaten Matarazzo, Dustin across five series of Stranger Things, is making his West End debut.
Who is starring in Rent?
Gaten Matarazzo plays Mark Cohen, the film-maker whose camera frames the whole story. Travis Ross is Roger, the songwriter he lives with, and Alexa Lopez is Mimi, the dancer downstairs.
Billy Nevers plays Tom Collins and Jeevan Braich is Angel, the couple at the heart of the show’s tenderest writing. Lazy Violet is Maureen, with Olivier nominee Danielle Fiamanya as Joanne, and Joaquin Pedro Valdes completes the principals as Benny.
The company is completed by Baylie Carson, Laura Delany, Ryesha Higgs, Montoya Holloway-Johnson, Rhys Hopkins, Shem Omari James, Hannah Macpherson, TJ Matara-Holloway, Ryan Nixon, Leah Vassell, James Wilkinson-Jones and Kevin Yates.
What is Rent about?
It is Christmas Eve in New York’s East Village, and Mark and Roger are about to be evicted. Around them, a group of young artists are trying to make work, make rent and make it through a winter in which the AIDS epidemic is at its height.
Larson loosely followed La Bohème, moving Puccini’s starving poets to a squat downtown a century later, and the borrowing is deliberate: these are the same people, in the same trouble, singing rock instead of opera. What the show does with that is give a year of their lives – the loves that start, the friends who are lost, the work that gets made anyway – and ask what any of it is worth measured out. Its most famous number does the measuring in minutes.
The production carries an age guidance of 14 and over, and the venue lists themes of HIV and AIDS, bereavement, drug use, suicide, sex and sex work, alongside strong language, smoking, haze and strobe lighting.
Who is behind the production?
Luke Sheppard directs, an Olivier Award winner whose recent West End work includes & Juliet and Paddington: The Musical. Tom Jackson Greaves choreographs, with set design by David Woodhead and costume design by Gabriella Slade.
Lighting is by Howard Hudson, audio production and sound design by Paul Gatehouse, and video design and cinematography by George Reeve and Nathan Amzi – worth noting in a show whose narrator carries a camera. Jackie Saundercock designs make-up and hair, Bill Sherman is musical supervisor and Katy Richardson musical director, with Asha Jennings-Grant as intimacy director, Priya Patel Appleby as associate director and Joe Trill as dialect coach. Casting is by Pearson Casting in the UK and Jim Carnahan in the US.
It is produced in the West End by Chris Harper Productions, Sonia Friedman Productions, Winkler & Smalberg and Julie Larson, in association with the Hope Mill Theatre.
When and where can I see it?
Rent runs at the Tom Stoppard Theatre – the Duke of York’s under its new name – at 104 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4BG. First performance is Saturday 26 September 2026 and the booking period currently runs to Saturday 27 March 2027.
Evening performances are at 7.30pm Monday to Saturday, with matinees on Thursdays and Saturdays at 2.30pm. There are no Sunday performances. Tickets currently start at £29, and a six-month booking period means there is more choice of date now than there will be closer to opening.
What else should I book if I like it?
Hadestown is the closest relative on in London: another retelling of an old story in a downtown bar, sung almost throughout, and similarly interested in whether love survives poverty.
Hamilton is the show Rent made possible – Lin-Manuel Miranda has never been shy about the debt – and it takes the same trick of setting American history to the music young people actually listen to.
Jesus Christ Superstar is the ancestor: the rock score that proved a musical could be sung end to end without a spoken line.
And if it is Luke Sheppard’s staging you want more of, Paddington: The Musical is his other show in the West End – a very different evening, and the clearest demonstration of his range.
