Rent musical review: This dated show is admittedly full of bangers

Rent musical review and star rating: ★★★ It’s pertinently ironic that Rent’s press night coincided with the London Film Festival premiere of Elsinore, Andrew Scott’s remarkably tender AIDS drama. Perhaps in the late-eightis when this musical was conceived, even talking about the epidemic on a stage was politically powerful, even if it were sprinkled as a theme rather than addressed head-on like dramas do today.  By those standards, Jonathan Larson’s Rent, which follows a group of creatives fighting eviction from their New York building, was once fearsomely progressive. New York’s housing crisis did disportionately affect people living with HIV, but by today’s standards, taking something so horrific as AIDS, which took the lives of 20,000 Brits alone, and putting it as a backdrop to a central story about people getting kicked out of their flats (which is dealt with with far more emotion) feels strange and tone deaf. Rent musical: go for the music When Rent was written, stigm