Being young, creative, and broke in a major city is the experience explored in La Bohème, the much-beloved opera composed by Giacomo Puccini based on Henri Murger’s 19th-century novel Scenes of Bohemian Life. The bohemians are the poet Rodolfo (tenor Pavel Petrov), painter Marcello (baritone Oded Reich), musician Schaunard (baritone Italo Proferisce), and Colline, a philosopher (bass Alex Birkus).
Starving and freezing, they are so overtaken with rage that Marcello threatens to “drown Pharaoh in the Red Sea” in the painting he is working on, and Rodolfo throws a play he wrote into the stove to burn for heating. They are saved from starvation and freezing in the Parisian winter when Schaunard bursts in with wine, wood, and food. Luckily, he met a wealthy English tourist who offered to pay him lavishly to he play his violin, “until his parrot dies.”
Proferisce was wonderful as he mimicked the English accent of the rich foreigner for comic effect and vividly described how, thanks to the kindness of the servant girl, he was able to “shove hemlock down the bird’s beak so it died like Socrates.”
Performed against a massive window, that, at times, alternately presents the audience with the Eiffel Tower or the City of Lights at night, the set designed by German Droghetti shows us the important, and silent, other power in this opera, the city itself. The uncaring social construct seen from the window has a colorful stained glass frame around it, an artistic detail that may not be necessary for its function, but without which, life is so much drabber.
Characters and actors in the opera
The bohemians inhabit a bifurcated reality, the actual one of poverty and strife and the other, where they are in the same world as Socrates and the parting of the Red Sea. This bifurcation is mirrored by Mimi (soprano Sofia Fomina) and Musetta (soprano Yael Levita).
Mimi is a highly sensitive seamstress who believes the first rays of spring are for her alone. She loves Rodolfo. Musetta, who loves Marcello, is a fierce woman who calls wealthy men by childish names and uses her feminine wiles to get what she wants. Levita shone as she broke a plate at Café Momus for attention and began singing “Quando me’n vo’”.
“When I walk,” she sang, “people stop and stare at me and look for my whole beauty from head to feet...” The audience clapped long and heartily afterward.
Fomina, who inhabits a far more tragic role, was fantastic during “Sì. Mi chiamano Mimì” (“Yes. They call me Mimi”), the powerful scene where she captures the heart of the poet, and also during “O buon Marcello, aiuto!” (Oh good Marcello, help me!), when she asked Marcello to help her and Rodolfo.
Reich, always a joy to watch on stage, used his long frame well to emphasize the more comical aspects of his relationship with the slightly shorter Levita and proved a wonderful partner to Petrov, to whom he is an excellent friend and contrast in this performance.
The romance of Paris is emphasized by revival directors Eike Ecker and Regina Alexandrovskaya in this production. When the massive set pieces are put together and the light switch is flicked on, darkness becomes light, and the stage becomes a Christmas fair.
The adults in the audience gasped with delight over this magic trick as the children on stage began to cry out for Parpignol, the toy vendor, requesting tin soldiers and a drum too.
When Frank Corsaro directed this opera in the 1970s, he had Parpignol sell erotic postcards, and Colline was an amputee who had lost a limb in the Great War. This adaptation is subtler. The innocent greed of the children who cry out for tasty things to eat and play with is mirrored by the adults who order fancy foods at Café Momus and buy a warm winter coat and a trumpet.
Women, too, Puccini hints, are a coveted item that can be had at a price.
These dark undercurrents are hinted at when the soldiers march past the city square with the Tricolore [flag of France] blazing after the fair scene. The child’s toy soldiers had become flesh and blood men who marched off, perhaps never to return again.
Birkus deserves a nod for his exceptional performance when saying goodbye to his winter coat, which he sells to help a friend in need, speaking about how the jacket “held books in one pocket and never bowed its back to the masters of the world.”
Even the playfulness of the bohemians, alas, cannot outrun the larger realities of this mortal coil.