Vancouver Opera’s season-ending production should charm existing fans and win the approbation of opera newbies
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Vancouver Opera’s La Bohème
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When: April 25-May 4
Where: Queen Elizabeth Theatre
Tickets:vancouveropera.ca
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One of the all-time favourites of the repertoire, Puccini’s La Bohème, concludes Vancouver Opera’s latest season in an extended five-performance, partly double-cast run that opened Saturday at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. It’s a old-fashioned proposition, but I mean this as no backhanded compliment. Rather, this is a conspicuous success that should charm existing fans and win the approbation of opera newbies.
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Though supposedly set in 1830s Paris, Bohème occupies a mythic Operaland where love at first sight is the norm and implausible plot twists can be resolved in a few bars of exquisite music. Unlike VO’s last Bohème, a pretentious overblown conceit that tried to impose meta-narratives and forced novelty, this is a “what you see is what you get” staging, which accepts that crushing poverty, disease, kindness and, ultimately, love, can be the stuff of bourgeois entertainment.
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Sun Spots
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When you strip away the comic antics of a quartet of supposedly starving bohemians and an extravagant Christmas Eve on the Left Bank, Bohème is a rather restrained, pastel tale that has maintained its place in the repertoire for more than a century because of one thing alone: Puccini’s incomparable score, which if handled with care and respect, moves us every time.
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Respect is the key word of director Brenna Corner’s staging. There’s lots of good stuff in her handling of Rudolfo and his pals in the first and fourth acts, but it never shouts “Look at me, aren’t I a clever director?” The big second act is fun, but when we need visual quiet to hear the lead singers deliver, Corner pays them (and the score) the compliment of letting them get on with Puccini’s music.
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Care is what VO conductor emeritus Jonathan Darlington provides. Here, we have a conductor of exceptional gifts, a magician in the pit, creating an assured balance and a sumptuous but exactly calibrated sound. How we’ve missed him.
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The geometry of the tale centres on two couples. Saturday’s leads were Jonelle Sills as Mimi and Matthew White as Rudolfo, backed by a subsidiary couple of Musetta, sung by Lara Ciekiewicz and Marcello, delivered with confidence and great good humour by baritone Gregory Dahl; then there’s a trio of Rudolfo’s artist pals, and a smattering of tiny roles for five other male voices. Though one rarely becomes aware of it, this is an opera short on women’s roles, which makes it vital to get Mimi and Musetta right.
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If the strategy of the cast of characters is brilliant, so is the trajectory of the piece. For this production, Acts 1 and 2 are combined before the intermission, with Acts 3 and 4 following. Stage setups impose necessary pauses in the action, so to keep audiences from becoming restless, a slowly unfolding projected text fills in the gaps on the storyline while the stage crew does their work. Act 1 is fun and games in the garret, plus the meet cute of our principals; Act 2 is all grand set pieces, including Musetta’s big solo turn.
