La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa & Luigi Illica.
Opera Australia at Canberra Theatre Centre. July 17-19 2025.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 17
Creatives
Director: Dean Bryant
Revival Director: Warwick Doderell
Set & Costume Designer: Isabel Hudson
Lighting Designer: Damien Cooper
Children’s Chorus Master: Stephanie Arnold
Conductor: Simon Bruckard
Language: Italian with English surtitles
Setting: modern
Cast
Rodolfo – John Longmuir; Mimi – Danita Weatherstone
Marcello – Andrew Williams; Musetta – Cathy-Di Zhang
Schaunard – Kiran Rajasingam / Michael Lampard
Benoit & Alcindoro – Eugene Raggio; Colline – Eddie Muliaumaseali’i
Parpignol & Chorus – Nick Kirkup; Chorus – Maia Andrews; Sarah Prestwidge Alexander Selton; Benjamin Del Borrell
La Bohème is a morality play designed to teach a lesson to young men about how to treat young women properly. Such a story is inevitably at risk of confronting the listener with injunctions they would prefer to ignore.
Presenting this play as an opera risks creating an overblown sense of its own importance. This is one reason I have never been a dedicated opera buff.
This production of La Bohème by Opera Australia knows the risks and how to win the moral and theatrical day. Puccini and his librettists are hard task-masters musically and dramatically. Dean Bryant and the whole team get everything right.
The measure of their success is how they made the change over interval. The first half is often light-hearted, even comical as the four young men play out their natural fascination with the beauty of Mimi and Musetta – though also revealing their sexist attitudes. It even seems, for example, that Mimi is not as sick as she pretends to be when she first approaches her next door neighbour, Rodolfo, and can’t find her key to return to her rooms.
The risk is that the shift to being, literally, deadly serious in the second half may not be believable. But Danita Weatherstone, our Mimi last night, captured our feelings immediately, as she asked a policeman about Rodolfo’s whereabouts to begin Act Two. Of course, the music – instrumental and voice – help, but it is the acting by all the cast which made her death real to us– from consumption, or tuberculosis, which was increasingly common when the opera was first performed in the 1890s.
Our sense of that reality, 135 years later, lifts our understanding of Puccini’s team’s purpose. Just as we see happening in our ‘social media’ times, those male ‘conventions’ about women as, to quote, ‘witches’, have to change in the face of reality.
Even if they are, as these young men claim to be, bohemian artists – so self-important.
This
production, by successfully creating true empathy in us, as these
characters realise the error of their youthful ways, shifts from being
almost a caricature of artists in Act One to making us understand the
quality and sincerity of the performances, on stage and in the pit, of
these theatrical artists – men, women and even children.
A production not to be missed.
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La Bohème Act One Opera Australia, Canberra Theatre 2025 |
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La Bohème Act Two Opera Australia, Canberra 2025 |