Rent isn't as good a musical as it might have been if its creator and composer, Jonathan Larson, had lived to work on it further.

But his death from a heart attack just a few hours after its first dress rehearsal - and after seven years struggling to bring the work to the stage while eking out a living as a waiter - proved a publicist's dream.

It mirrored the story of the show itself and helped Rent to the status of a cult success which has so far taken $150m in two years on Broadway.

It's all loosely based on Puccini's opera La Boheme. Boy gets girl, girl gets girl, boy gets drag artist. But this time the poverty-stricken bohemians live not in Paris but in New York's East Village and Aids - not TB - is the killer.

The characters are aspiring song-writers, film-makers and performance artists. Half of them are junkies.

The tunes are good - if closer to Lloyd Webber than real rock music - and the cast (including four from the original Broadway production) appealing and exploding with energy.

Here, as in New York, the front two rows in the stalls are sold cheaply (�10) on the day; there are youngsters who queue to see it many times over - the English nanny Louise Woodward saw it 22 times in Boston.

But Britain's youth, used to more cynical fare like Trainspotting, may be more hard-bitten. For them Rent may prove too sentimental, even mawkish - while for the coach trade on which most long-running musicals depend it may be too uncompromising, not to say too noisy.