JONATHAN Larson, who wrote the book, music and lyrics for the ground-breaking New York rock opera Rent, died suddenly on the eve of the first off-Broadway performance in 1996.

This has always added poignancy to a sung-through musical that was as raw as workshop theatre could be, and remains as imperfect as life, and still at least a couple of songs too long. What has changed in the intervening years is the gradual accretion of a cult status not dissimilar to The Rocky Horror Show.

On the evidence of Thursday’s lively matinee, audience members now revel in joining in with Maureen’s mooing in her protest performance art-piece Over The Moon, as well as shouting out assorted lines, and whooping their approval of now familiar set-pieces, especially when Layton Williams is strutting his drag-act stuff as Angel.

Bruce Guthrie’s new touring production for the 20th anniversary has been cast brilliantly and spectacularly energetically, and even the absence through illness of 2017 Eurovision Song Contest singer Lucie Jones from the role of agitprop artist Maureen Johnson was amply compensated by her understudy, (the anything but modest!) Christina Modestou.

Inspired by Puccini’s opera La Bohème, Rent’s story of doomed lovers is set between two Christmases in a mid-Nineties’ New York East Village in the dark shadow of the HIV and AIDS epidemic and revolves around two squatters, former junkie punk singer, guitarist and composer Roger Davis (Ross Hunter) and videographer/narrator Mark Cohen (Billy Cullum). Roger is HIV positive, and so is his new girlfriend, exotic dancer Mimi Marquez (Philippa Stefani). Meanwhile, Mark’s girlfriend, the aforementioned bisexual, campaigning Maureen (Modestou), has dumped him for a woman in a fierce, fractious relationship with lawyer Joanne Jefferson (Shanay Holmes).

Caught up in the story too are Williams’s cross-dressing Angel, newly partnered with Ryan O’Gorman’s Tom Collins, and the rent-demanding Benjamin Coffin III (Javar La’Trail Parker).

Guthrie’s invigorating, loud, proud production embraces Rent’s imperfections, its spirit of defiance and confrontational style, with more wit to counter the earnestness of past productions, while capturing the urgency, fear and desperation that prevailed in New York at the time. The importance of camaraderie and love bursts through Larson’s rough-edged rock, blues, gospel and soul songs as the group of impoverished bohemian artists struggle to maintain friendships and non-conformist ideals but ultimately discover what matters most in life.

All the ensemble company is in tremendous voice in a show that was of its moment but feels reborn in this outstanding revival, none more so than Layton Williams’s definitive Angel, evoking an elongated Prince in his singing and movement.

Rent, 20th Anniversary Tour, York Theatre Royal, 7.3pm tonight; 2.30pm and 7.30pm tomorrow. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk