REVIEW: La bohème, Opera North, Theatre Royal
Tragic tale leaves audience happy
One of opera’s saddest stories couldn’t dampen the party atmosphere in Newcastle as Bonfire Night fireworks burst overhead and Champions League football (with a pleasing result) was played at St James’ Park.
Curious though it might seem, it did anything but.
Puccini’s La bohème is a musical firecracker and Phyllida Lloyd’s production for Opera North, more than 30 years old now, is a tried-and tested audience pleaser.
“If it ain’t broke…,” quipped general director Laura Canning during the interval – and so back it comes, refreshed by revival director James Hurley having last graced this stage nearly a decade ago.
We’re in 1950s Paris, a magnet for penniless arty types, and the story begins and ends in a paint-splattered garret where Rodolfo (aspiring writer) and Marcello (ditto painter) struggle to keep cold and the rent-collecting landlord at bay.
When Marcello and friends Colline and Schaunard head for the café, Rodolfo stays behind and answers the door to a neighbour, the pretty but ailing Mimi, who asks for a light because her candle has blown out.
Also ignited is their mutual love and at this point it really struck home how beautifully cast this production is, the performances of Joshua Blue and Isabella Díaz driving away all potential distractions in a packed theatre.
He’s British-American, she’s Chilean, and both have extraordinary voices, well able to carry sweet nothings over a 70-strong orchestra. But their acting is equally memorable.
Blue’s Rodolfo is a particularly magnetic presence on a stage permanently framed in white like a Polaroid snap (that being an invention of the age). His personality seemed to burst from the frame.
When the couple embraced for a famous duet under a full moon, you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone, it seemed, was now signed up and along for the ride.
Running parallel to the Rodolfo/Mimi affair is that of Marcello and the mischievous Musetta who makes a film star entrance with her wealthy suitor, Alcindoro, and then leaves the “old fossil” to settle everyone’s café bill before departing on the arm of her old flame.
Katie Bird delivers a high octane Musetta, one minute on the seats, the next writhing on the floor beneath Marcello (Korean baritone Josef Jeongmeen Ahn enjoying himself, no doubt) but winning applause for her famous Musetta’s Waltz aria, one of La bohème’s showstopping moments.
It doesn’t end well, of course, poor Mimi’s flame extinguished despite the well-meaning but quite useless attempts of Musetta and the lads to keep her alive.
Still, she sings like a bird in her dying moments and on the way to this tragic conclusion are moments of riotous joy with the stage full of Opera North kids in winter clothes and the Opera North Chorus manifesting the kind of café customers who no doubt brought colour to bohemian Paris night life.
If you’re in for the Thursday matinee performance of this funny, sad and thoroughly enjoyable production, you’ll see and hear a different though equally talented cast of principals.
The aforementioned brilliant bunch of singers will be back on stage on Saturday evening (November 8) – joined, as ever, in the pit by Opera North’s versatile orchestra of which there can be few equals.
Opera North are also performing Handel’s Susanna on Friday (Nov 7) and The Big Opera Mystery (a family-friendly introduction to opera) on Saturday afternoon.
Tickets from the Theatre Royal website.