YOUNG York company NUE Music Theatre will complete a hat-trick of cutting-edge musical choices for their first three shows with Rent, New York’s most electrifying rock-opera of the 1990s.

Already, the company has staged the gay love story Bare: A Pop Opera and Bat Boy: The Musical, a kind of Rocky Horror Show-style retelling of Tim Burton’s outsider movie, Edward Scissorhands, last year.

Now NUEMusic are to present Jonathan Larson and Billy Aronson’s update of Puccini’s La Boheme, relocated from the Parisian Left Bank to New York’s East Village and the contemporary problems of AIDS, drugs and poverty.

The 1996 American musical will be performed at 41 Monkgate, York, from July 18 to 20 with its blend of rock, blues, gospel and soul music.

The story is set between two Christmases and revolves around two squatters, former junkie punk singer, guitarist and composer Roger Davis and videographer Mark Cohen. Roger is HIV-positive, and so to his new girlfriend, Mimi Marquez, a heroin-addicted exotic dancer at a sadomasochist club.

Meanwhile, Mark’s performance-artist girlfriend, Maureen Johnson, has dumped him for a woman, Joanne Jefferson.

The show opens with Roger trying to come to terms with the suicide of his HIV-positive former girlfriend and striving to write a knockout song before he dies. Show composer Jonathan Larson died suddenly of an aneurysm on the day before the off-Broadway previews begin, and so he never knew his own songs went on to win Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards.

Rent has gone on to global success and NUE Music actress Robyn Grant, who will play the bisexual Maureen, believes it is time to take a new look at Larsson’s musical with a 2013 setting.

“NUEMusic like to do their own thing,” she says.

“So we hope we hope to bring fresh views and a new lease of life to an overdone musical, really stripping it back to its roots and creating an original, organic piece of theatre.”

NUEMusic’s production will be directed by stage director and film-maker Cal O’Connell, working in tandem with musical director Thomas Marlow, a 21-year-old postgraduate student at the University of York.

“What we thrive on as a company is having creative team that allows us express ourselves, but what’s great is that Cal and Thomas will tell us where we’re going wrong, which means it will be tighter than our previous shows,” says Robyn.

Fellow company member Aran MacRae, who will play Roger, has worked previously with Cal at York Stage Musicals. “He shares our vision to be free and able to do our own thing in rehearsal,” he says.

“That was important for us, because it’s a rock opera, we want to have the chance for it to come from our hearts.”

Robyn believes Rent defined a new age of musicals. “It changed musical theatre as it addressed such a devastating issue and responded to it with a rock musical – and in doing so, musicals like Spring Awakening came about because of it,” she says.

“It’s not perfect but it’s still very relevant, and that’s why we’re bringing it forward to now when we’re all a bit lost and we’re skint.

“The show has become associated with its look and its songs, but there’s more to it than that; its essence is about loving your friends and yourself.”