Sure, we get an appropriately youthful cast, but the singing is only adequate for most, and spectacular for very few.
Musetta will later discover Mimì dying and bring her to the boys’ atelier, where Rodolfo and Mimì confess their love just before she dies. A secondary plot concerns Rodolfo’s roommate Marcello and his relationship with the beautiful Musetta with whom he is constantly battling as she’s a commitment-phobe who seesaws between dating the poor painter and flirting with Paris’s upper-class bachelors. The two garret-dwellers love each other fervently but must break up due to Mimì’s illness and Rodolfo’s inability to communicate and care for her financially. The central relationship is between the writer Rodolfo and his neighbor Mimì, a consumption-suffering embroiderer of flowers. Despite their non-existent income and subsequent lack of heat, four Belle Époque artist friends exist in happy poverty within Paris’s Latin Quarter.
If you’re not acquainted with La Bohème, you may recognize the storyline from a little musical called Rent. The opera’s four-act libretto, written by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, is based on Henri Murger’s 1851 collection of short stories, Scènes de la vie de bohème. But that didn’t mean he had to suck the life out of this perfect score. Director Barry Kosky says in the program notes that the opera is about death. (Artistic Director Plácido Domingo, who sometimes conducts, was nowhere to be seen or heard from on opening night, as he still faces accusations of sexual misconduct). Sure, it’s always gorgeous to listen to, especially with this orchestra, which never sounded better under conductor James Conlon, conducting La Bohème for the first time with LA Opera as he beautifully draws out all the score’s romantic sonorities. An opera about life and death becomes an opera about self-absorbed Bohemians. The latest production that opened LA Opera’s 2019/2020 season manages somehow to offer a production that left me dry-eyed at the end, which never happened during previous visits to La Bohème. It’s hard to go wrong (in general) with Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera - a relatively light tragedy buoyed with easy-to-love characters, provocative music, and a lot of humor.
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