The world of opera can sometimes resemble a very posh if slightly deranged merry-go-round: a maddening loop of old favourites endlessly rotating through time and space. These core works are constantly revived because they show the form at its brightest and most vital. They also come with an enormous amount of baggage.
Puccini’s La Bohème surely ranks among the most encumbered; immortalised by the likes of Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann, it feels so encrusted with cultural associations that any new production has to work hard to carve out a point of view. It’s an opera director’s calling card, but it can very easily collapse into cliche.
Director Constantine Costi seems an obvious choice to helm a new production for Opera Australia, which has been happily reviving Gale Edwards’ perfectly serviceable version for a decade, even as recently as last year. Costi has an eye for lush romanticism and is an excellent director of actors; his vision for this tale of poor, freezing artists falling in and out of love was always going to be worth seeing. Whether or not it surpasses previous iterations is another matter.
La Bohème is the pinnacle of verismo opera, a form that eschews the historical or mythological subjects of the past for something more immediate and realistic. It isn’t plot driven and has no villain, unless you count the merciless Parisian winter that bumps off the heroine. The story of a group of struggling artists and philosophers living in a freezing garret, it could be staged intimately and on a budget, as poor a theatre as the people depicted on stage.
But somehow, that’s not how opera companies choose to approach it. Lavish opulence seems to dominate, especially in the second act, which takes place in a Parisian cafe and is now apparently an excuse for maximalist scenic profligacy. Costi goes all out here, in a frenzy of visual excess to rival the medieval imagination of Hieronymus Bosch. It makes Edwards’ production look positively monastic.
Before all that, though, is the first act, one of opera’s most charming and effortless, where we meet our Bohemians and fall in love with them as quickly as they fall in love with each other. Poet and playwright Rodolfo (Kang Wang) is our central lover, or will be by the end of the act when a waif-like seamstress wanders in from next door. This is Mimi (Galina Cheplakova), the kind of character beloved by writers from Dostoevsky to Ted Hughes – a spotless angel who’s also conveniently a sex bomb, a vessel of purity to cleanse the male spirit, and a dynamo in the sack. We also meet Rodolfo’s gang, painter Marcello (Luke Gabbedy), philosopher Colline (David Parkin, excellent) and musician Schaunard (Shane Lowrencev, filling in for Stephen Marsh).
Garrets are small, cramped and uninsulated, so it makes sense that set designer Dann Barber would restrict the playing space to a small box framed by black curtains. It does mean the friends tend to trip over each other in those opening moments, but this merely adds to the verisimilitude. The transition into the full stage, when it comes, is gorgeously realised, the lovers winched up on a timber scaffold over the streets of Paris.
Act two is a problem, however. Barber and costume designer Sabina Myers overstuff the stage with so much visual stimulus – Virgin Marys, carnival creatures, nuns, masks and a giant papier-mache cardinal – that the action becomes completely lost and the work drifts dangerously close to pure pageantry. Artistic references abound, from Chagall to Georges Méliès, and the taste level is very high, but there’s simply too much of it with no palpable dramatic justification. Is it to satisfy jaded audiences that they’re getting their money’s worth?
The final two acts are a marked improvement, perhaps because the design retreats and allows the story to do the emotional work. The third act opens on an exquisitely doleful tableaux of grim winter; the scene where Rodolfo confesses to Marcello that Mimi is going to die, not realising that she’s listening, is achingly poignant; and the final scenes of death are beautifully calibrated.
Cheplakova is glorious as the doomed heroine, shimmering in her thin motley coat when we meet her, hollowed and racked at the end. Her top register is sublime, those magnificent trills in her opening aria descending like snowflakes from the rafters. She has undeniable chemistry with Wang, who is underpowered in the opening act, although he has a lovely clean sound. But he improves markedly and eventually they soar together. Gabbedy is terrific as the loyal Marcello, even lumbered with a shocking Warwick Capper wig, and Alexandra Flood is excellent as the flighty but eventually pragmatic Musetta.
Orchestra Victoria’s playing, under the baton of British conductor Finnegan Downie Dear, is supple and strong, with especially fine work from the woodwinds, and the Opera Australia chorus are powerful and sonorous. Costi’s vision is a deliberate challenge to the notion of the opera as verismo, the streets of Paris transformed into a medieval panopticon worthy of Ken Russell. It withdraws its maximalism, though, just in time to land its emotional beats. It mightn’t be a Bohème for the ages, but it’s certainly worth another trip around the carousel.
Opera Australia’s La Bohème is on at Melbourne’s Regent theatre until 18 November, then Sydney Opera House 2 January-17 March
