Hitherto I have always maintained that, despite a twelve-year run on Broadway, an unidentifiable something has prevented Jonathan Larson’s posthumously acclaimed rock rewrite of La Bohème from bringing its full power across the Atlantic. It may have to do with bridging the gap between rock and music theatre idioms, or with that blend of defiance and sentimentality with which Larson tells his story of loft-squatting artists in New York’s Alphabet City (with AIDS replacing the consumption of Puccini’s original), or with staging that often seemed too mimsy for its subject matter. To my surprise, Bruce Guthrie’s 20th-anniversary revival deals with most of these problems in a no-nonsense manner.

The medium size of the St James Theatre (where this is the last production before Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group rebrands it as the Other Palace) helps a great deal. Whereas West End productions have always ultimately felt like shows, the 300-seater scale of this revival increases both the intimacy and the intensity of various aspects, as regards both staging and sound. (It was heartening, as I entered, to hear a guitarist limbering up in heavy overdrive with harmonic feedback.) The score has never been a problem; rather, I suspect, it’s the over-rhymed Sondheimesque lyrics, but even they largely skip past this time without jarring.

Characterisations also feel more immediate: Lucie Jones commands when performing Maureen’s performance art piece, and Layton Williams is simply stellar as the drag queen Angel, even when wordlessly dying in the background of “Without You”, which is a duet between one of the story’s other couples. All in all, the story is sold much more successfully than in other versions I’ve seen.

And yet, paradoxically, it still doesn’t hit home. I fear this is because, after 20 years, it has dated badly... partly in respect of the scourge-of-AIDS strand, but principally because its context is all but unrecognisable now. In our world, Benny, the developer who aims to buy out the squatted warehouse and turn it into prestigious and lucrative studios, has comprehensively won. What once felt simply foreign to British audiences is now politically-philosophically alien to us all. Guthrie’s staging works wonderfully, only for the piece’s content to have unexpectedly flaked away.

Written for the Financial Times.