It’s officially summer blockbuster season, and for the War Memorial Opera House, that means La bohème. So popular is Puccini’s timeless tale of Parisian bohemian life that San Francisco Opera has staged it more frequently than than any other opera. (Madama Butterfly and Tosca run a close second and third; Giacomo, watch him go.)
Confession time: I have never truly loved La bohème. Like nearly any major commercial work of art that purports to chronicle the broke-artist substratum, it feels written from a place of easy contentment. Tonally, it’s not desperate and insane enough to me, and to my own years of living in unheated attics, laundry rooms and garages.
The challenge for a director, then, is to make its characters believably destitute, instead of Parisians playacting as starving artists before returning to the bourgeoisie. The current production at San Francisco Opera does not succeed in this, but no matter — that’s a me problem. Most audiences will assuredly find it enjoyable, and find it a faithful presentation of one of the most loved operas of all time.
San Francisco Opera leans into this populism with acrobats, jugglers and unicyclists performing in the opera house lobby, among set pieces evoking the Latin Quarter of the 1830s. John Caird’s staging draws inspiration from the absinthe-hued work of Toulouse-Lautrec; the set of the four main male characters’ apartment is full of haphazardly strewn canvases (they! are! artists!).
The run is double-cast; on Saturday, it was Pene Pati as Rodolfo and Karen Chia-ling Ho as Mimì, both remarkable, and who share a welcome, natural chemistry on the stage. (On the page, these are characters who fall in love only because Puccini says they did.) Pati, especially, comes into his own in the third act, when Rodolfo becomes wracked with guilt over his inability to help the woman he loves. As for Ho, her Mimì plays wonderfully with apprehension, coyness and ardor — and, eventually, capitulation to her failing health.
