La Bohème offers reminder of opera’s deep connection with messy, real human life

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Canadian Opera Company’s second revival of John Caird’s production balances the work’s inherent romanticism with the grimy underbelly intrinsic to its source material

is a story of love, loss and the hard-won wisdom that comes through the experience of both. Based on the semi-autobiographical) by French writer Henri Murger , the opera explores the life of a group of artist-friends in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1830s. Despite the mixed public reception at its 1896 premiere, the opera has gone on to enjoy immense popularity and has been envisioned by opera directors as taking place in 1950s Paris, in a cancer ward and aboard a spaceship.

This isn’t picture-postcard, pretty-poor-Paris; In Act One, you can practically smell the cramped garret, living quarters shared by young artist-friends. Marcello is a painter; Rodolfo , a poet; Colline , a philosopher; Schaunard , a musician. When the ill seamstress Mimi comes to the door asking whether Rodolfo can relight her candle, he is all charm and poetry, but his colleagues – whose jeers can be heard from the street – are wise to the act. Of course both poet and seamstress soon find there’s something beyond performative sweet talk binding them.

The garret spins to reveal the gaiety of Café Momus on Christmas Eve, its cavalcade of street sellers, rambunctious children , and daintily hung paper lanterns implying a moment of temporary merriment amid much larger misery., a pair of Parisian tollhouses named, according to some historians, because of the location’s reputation for criminality. The design and direction here are so evocative one almost expects Jean Valjean to pop out of a sewer.

 

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