Written in the last decade of the 19th century, Puccini's La bohème is firmly entrenched in the fin de siècle of the Age of Romanticism and the Age of Enlightenment, looking backwards at the melodramas of extreme sentimentality and emotionalism. Mimi’s consumptive death, in the final scene of the final act, is more than just an escapist tragic ending; it is also an emblematic marker for a passing world of fragile hopes and lost dreams that Puccini’s opera commemorates. In the next ten years, fires of nationalism would sweep through the European continent, and the world would be embroiled in the Great War. Millions would die and the world became a more sombre place.



This new production (pictured above) has been commissioned by the Opera Conference, the partnership of Australian opera companies, and was originally premiered in Brisbane in May 2005 by Opera Queensland, before arriving in Sydney and Melbourne by way of Opera Australia. In this interpretation, Simon Phillips sets his Bohemians in the Pomo Boho of the here and now. The outer acts take place in drab, grey council flats in lieu of Puccini’s Parisian garrets: a two-storey boxed set designed by Stephen Curtis, sliced vertically with the four Bohemians squatters occupying the lower level unit, and Mimi and her neighbours in the upper level, joined by immobile staircases at the side of the stage with landings doubling as balconies.

This entire set floats off the stage (albeit somewhat precariously), allowing the exterior of Café Momus and nighttime bazaar to be pushed forward and under as the action segues seamlessly into the second act, and after the intermission, once again converted into a “morning after” backstreet littered with trashbags and wheelie bins (freely transposing from Puccini’s setting of the third act on the French-Belgian border) before the flat set descends for the last act. Conceptually, the design is more mezzanine and subdued than Curtis’s efforts we have seen elsewhere (for instance, his over-the-top confections for the Sydney Theatre Company’s The Republic of Myopia from last year).

Much of the plot in La bohème is purely soap-operatic and director Phillips, who scored a runaway hit with his larger-than-life conceptualization of Berg’s Lulu in 2003, has admitted he would rather explore context of the story rather than concept on this time round with a vastly different type of opera. Exploring context in a soapie is not as thankless or futile as it sounds, even if the message (assuming there was any) may be a long time coming.

Nonetheless, his dramaturgy results here in a cornucopia of colourful characters, rowdy but tender, uneducated but street-smart, poor but rich. Part of the opera’s timeless appeal hinges on the outlandish manner and relationships between the self-titled Bohemians, and leads Jamie Allen (as eleventh-hour replacement) and Miriam Gordon-Stewart play their parts of Rodolfo and Mimi exactly so, and with great sentiment in their love scenes. Amelia Farrugia, who was a show-stealing Adele in Die Fledermaus earlier this year, returns as a mincy Musetta, singing with a vibrant Italianate timbre, yet provides supporting pith and emotion at Mimi’s death bed without distracting from the centrality of the pathos.

The use of a red rose mural on the louvered window panels in the Bohemians’ flat was an obvious and deliberate visual emphasis on the opera’s central theme of tragic love: ingeniously backlit by lighting designer Matt Scott to frame the lovers in their duet in Act One, its turgid, scarlet warmth belying what must otherwise have been a freezing winter’s night, what with the power out and a single candle to light the darkness. Scott also uses colouration for dramatic punctuation elsewhere, often drenching the stage in splashy colours to accentuate a scene or character with an almost cinematographic flair.

Similarly, Andrea Licata (right) is a practiced exponent of opera and his direction from the orchestral pit has bags of sparkle and character in the music-making, catching the passion (if not the delicacy) of Puccini’s lyricism and supporting the on-stage action quite ably. It was also a pleasant surprise to find guest chorus master Terry Edwards working with the Opera Australia Chorus, imparting his trademark incisive quality and teamwork with which he has established a formidable reputation with his own choral group, the London Voices. (Under Edwards’s imprimatur, the London Voices have been featured in numerous classical, operatic and film soundtrack recordings (including John Williams’s music for the Star Wars prequels trilogy and the Harry Potter films, Howard Shore’s music for Dogma and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as other work like Eliot Goldenthal’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within soundtrack.)

Speaking of music, it was coincidental – and perhaps testament to the popularity of Puccini’s operatic setting – that the West Australian Ballet's rendition of the opera, with music adapted and arranged by Kevin Hocking and choreographed by Simon Dow, was already running at the Parramatta Riverside Theatres, finishing just two days after this opera production began at the Opera House. While it is not uncommon for the ballet to dip into operatic repertoire for material– one thinks of John Lanchberry’s adaptations of Madame Butterfly, Don Quixote and The Merry Widow for The Australian Ballet – it is interesting to note that the Hocking-Dow adaptation was the first one on La bohème.



Click here to read about more Opera Australia Productions:
Rinaldo (2005) conducted by Trevor Pinnock