Van Outen's theater credits include starring as Roxie Hart in both the West End and Broadway productions of Chicago, Tell Me on a Sunday, Les Miserables, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Stop the World. Before co-hosting the U.S. reality show to pick the stars of the current Broadway revival of Grease, she appeared on London TV in The Big Breakfast with Johnny Vaughn and This Morning and served as a judge for for the BBC's reality casting program Any Dream Will Do.
Directed by William Baker, this new version of Rent has been reworked and re-orchestrated by Baker and Steve Anderson, the creative team behind Kylie Minogue.
Larson's show opened at Broadway's Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996, and is still running. Rent first came to London in 1998, in a recreation of Michael Greif's original staging, where it ran at the Shaftesbury Theatre for 17 months. It subsequently had another West End run, in a different production, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in December 2001.