A group of artists struggling to pay the rent in New York City during the AIDS pandemic hardly sounds like the formula for a hit musical.

But Jonathan Larson’s musical, Rent, smashed box office records in the late 1990s with its brilliant songs and strident affirmation of “La vie Bohème” – the Bohemian life.

As many readers will be aware, Larson, who wrote the book, music and lyrics and would surely have proved one of the greats of musical theatre had he lived, died not of AIDS but of an incorrectly-diagnosed heart condition in 1996, just before Rent hit The Great White Way.

His other well-known show, Tick, Tick… Boom! will be staged by ACT Hub late this year.

The plot of Rent is complex and its songs are many.

Each of the main characters in Rent matches characters in Puccini’s opera La Bohème, as the parallel is drawn between artists starving in French garrets and those trying to pay the rent in 20th century lower Manhattan.

This is not West Side Story but rather East Village Story, with the action focusing on a tight group of principals, with 10 other supporting actors.

Documentary filmmaker Mark (Marcello in La Boheme) is the observer, while muso Roger, (Rodolpho) searching for a perfect riff (which sounds much like Musetta’s Waltz), an HIV-positive recovering junkie. Club dancer Mimi, (also Mimi in the opera) performance artist Maureen (Musetta), her girlfriend lawyer Joanne, philosophy teacher Collins, (Colline) drag queen Angel (Schaunard) and landlord Benny (Benoît) make up the number.

But this is not opera, it’s largely rock and R&B.

Some moments are the precise equivalent of the opera as in the number Light my Candle, when Roger and Mimi meet in the dark.

Now, with two pandemics more or less behind us, a sellout Australian production of Rent will hit Canberra in June.

It’s a lavish production directed by Sean Rennie, well known for having starred here in Mary Poppins then directed Wicked, both for Free Rain Theatre.

Notably, Rennie became revival director of La Bohème for opera Australia after OA’s then artistic director Lyndon Terracini saw Rennie’s 25th anniversary production of Rent at the Opera House, a reworking of his 2016 Hayes Theatre staging, which won the Broadway World Award for Best Direction.

All these versions of Rent have been staged by LPD Productions, the brainchild of two outstanding former Canberrans, Lauren Peter and Toby Francis, the latter best known for his starring role in Kinky Boots.

I caught up with Peters by phone to Perth, where she was on tour with the show.

Peters met Queanbeyan-born Francis, formed LPD Productions in 2018, in the drama class at Hawker College, long-known for its strong theatre strand.

Both soon left town to study at an acting school in Sydney, but while Francis took to the boards, Peters went into set designing, ending up at the Hayes Theatre, where they launched that award-winning 2016 production of Rent.

“Now we’ve made it bigger,” she tells me, adding that the show still packs a punch.

“To me, Rent is about love and to me, love never gets old. We really focus on that,” Peter says.

“There are eight people suffering through the AIDS crisis, but it’s love that gets them through… It was a very heartbreaking period, but there is heartbreak now, too, as the cost of paying rent in Australia is going right through the roof.”

Mind you, arguments have raged since the ’90s as to whether Rent also has a verbal meaning, as in the expression “his heart was rent”.

In Rent, she says, the audience observes 12 months of lives unfolding in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

When Rent first came out, she says, it attracted a great deal of social commentary, partly because it portrayed characters from HIV positive, queer, trans, Jewish, LatinX, and Afro American communities.

“But the real shock was that it talked about HIV and queers relationships and realising your sexual self in a very open way, summed up in the song La Vie Bohème – it was considered risqué for its time.”

Unlike La Bohème, which ends with Mimi’s death, there is hope for the end of Rent as Mimi chooses life and the characters come out as new people.

“There’s a message that the characters will all be okay. They feel, ‘I’ve got a place in the world’. It’s amazing how it’s touched so many people,” Peters says.

Rent, Canberra Theatre, June 7-15.