RENT was The York Orchard Theatre Company's fourth and biggest show so far, ambitiously staged at the Grand Opera House but for two nights only.

In every way that was a risky decision: a big theatre is an exciting prospect for a fledgling company but filling 1,000 seats, even in a short run, especially when presenting an abrasive musical with AIDS and HIV and American brats at its core.

Jonathan Larson's cult 1996 rock opera was last staged in York in July 2013 by a similarly nascent company of burgeoning talents, NUEMusic Theatre, in the much more compact 41 Monkgate studio theatre with seating on three sides, giving the piece an immediate intimacy and feeling of confrontation.

By comparison, at the Opera House, Orchard producer/director Justine Hughes utilised a familiar design for musical theatre shows in proscenium arch theatres with stairways and walkways to elevate the drama to a higher ground. It falls on the cast to build bridges with the audience and Orchard's strongest hand in a company where everyone is 25 or under is the quality of its principal players, and here they responded to Larson's challenging, often rough-edged songs with impressive vim.

Loosely based on Puccini's opera La Boheme, Rent's story is set between two Christmases in New York's East Village and revolves around two squatters, former junkie punk singer, guitarist and composer Roger Davis (Josh Eldridge-Smith, 20, from Scarborough) and video-diarist Mark Cohen (All Saints' School pupil Sam Lightfoot-Loftus, 17), the narrator.

Roger is HIV positive, and so is his new girlfriend, exotic dancer Mimi Marquez (Beth Stevens). Meanwhile, Mark's performance-artist girlfriend, bisexual Maureen Johnson (Rosie Winter), has dumped him for a woman, lawyer Joanne Jefferson (Sophie Walmsley). Caught up in the story too are Matthew Dangerfield's cross-dressing Angel, the Mercutio of Rent, newly partnered with Richard Bayton's Tom Collins. Always emerging from the shadows is the rent-demanding Benjamin Coffin III (Conor Mellor, in his third of four American roles in quick succession this year).

Rent is not easy to sing, with many of its songs being in the descriptive spoken-sung style, and its story is not always easy to follow, its rawness and imperfections resulting from the sudden death of its writer, Jonathan Larson, just as it was opening off-Broadway.

Orchard's cast rightly played on this spirit of defiance; the feeling of urgency, fear and toxic desperation; the agitprop anger in the face of death. Rachel Dennison's pugilistic choreography sought to match this, as did Ryan Durkan's ferocious musical direction with Damien Sweeting's electric guitar to the fore, though some costumes looked awkward and uncomfortably brazen.

Rent is a hard musical to endure, even with its message of the need for camaraderie and love, but it was lifted by the tremendous performances of Lightfoot-Loftus, the promising Dangerfield, the ever-excellent Mellor and in particular Stevens, with her fabulous voice, and Eldridge-Smith, who heads to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow as a North Yorkshire name to watch.