La Boheme

Last night another brunette and I wandered along to Puccini's La Boheme. It's surprising how hard it is to find people who want to go to the opera, or rather how many pop up *after* the event and say, oh I want to go to an opera...ballet and symphonies, no problems. Opera? issues. Not helped by the aged nature of the audience, jeez old people make a lot of odd noises.

So anyway, to drag myself away from a rant about old people at concerts, the basic plot revolves around the usual: boy meets girl, fall in love, some comedic relief by others (also in love), girl poorly, death. A more detailed summary can be found here. So what made this one good/great?

The stage direction and design was superb. The opera is traditionally set in a Parisian student quarter of 1830. This one was transplanted to a student flat in contemporary time, and it worked. Brilliantly. there's an interview with the designer in the Listener here. I've seen a DVD version in the traditional setting, and the transplant brought it to life much much better. I felt more empathy for the characters, I've lived in those places, I've been cold, I've had flats where we all held out for one us to get paid (or student loans). The opera is full of pathos to start with, but somehow this brought out more from the characters. The two main leads were superb, in particular Mimi played by Antoinette Halloran had a fantastic voice, and the interaction between her and Jesus Garcia who played Rudolfo was great. At times I thought the musicians weren't sympathetic enough to the singers, and at times the music was a bit ragged. I can see why a friend of mine a couple of years ago sent me some lyrics from La Boheme.

Overall? Excellent. Moving, interesting and brilliantly staged opera. I can see why purists would grumble, but TBH fuck'em, this worked, and it made it more interesting because of it. Realistically those purists are going to be dying off (judging by the age of the audience) and half of em wouldn't be able to see the stage anyway...

Oh, and there were vinyls in the flat, and vinyls in the market! and Rudolfo has a Mac PowerBookPro.

Capped off by a nice lemonade (no really!) at Midnight, since Simply Paris was closed.

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