It is hard to believe a company capable of coming up with a show as good as this could be in its death throes. But if the worst rumours are true, this Bohème may well be the last new production that Scottish Opera mounts in its full-time, full-scale form. Weakened by decades of underfunding and now being put to the sword by the Scottish Executive, it could well cease to exist within a matter of weeks. The company has always aimed ambitiously high, sometimes perhaps too high. But it has always stuck to its principles, and this production - perhaps its last hurrah - is a challenging staging by Stewart Laing of a core repertory work.

Laing (who supplies the designs as well as the direction) transplants the opera to present-day New York, specifically the Williamsburg artistic community in Brooklyn. Rather than a dank Parisian garret, Marcello and Rodolfo's studio is an airy loft, where they dabble in computer art and play video games. A painted cloth of the New York skyline fixes the location, while TV screens supply specific and tangential images. The Cafe Momus becomes the Museum of Modern Art, and the second act takes place there at a private view, in front of walls strewn with pastiches of a range of contemporary artists. Among the throng of guests, Perpignol is transformed into a transvestite not entirely unlike Grayson Perry, while the grey-suited Alcindoro isn't a million miles away from Charles Saatchi; he escorts a Musetta bearing a striking resemblance to the domestic goddess herself.

All that provides a surface wit and slickness that might seem just superficial if Laing had not made the central characters so real. The acting from all the principals is superb, and they play out this young person's tragedy with great tact and careful detail; the end is bleak, and pitiless. If the singing is generally decent rather than outstanding, it is buoyed up by Richard Farnes's conducting. And Roderick Williams's Marcello is genuinely classy while as Rodolfo, Peter Auty often sounds like a lyric tenor but demonstrates that he can push his voice quite hard. Rachel Hynes is a desperately touching Mimi, and Rebecca von Lipinski is a suitably flighty Musetta. An involving and defiantly different take on a familiar masterpiece.

· Repeated tomorrow. Box office: 0141-332 9000. Then touring from May 20.