Review: La Boheme is intimate but inert

The Spinoff

01-06-2025

NZ Opera's production of Puccini's masterpiece looks and sounds lovely, but would it work better in a different space?
Operas come with their own assumed cultural cache. Even if the general public – if such a thing exists anymore – isn't familiar with specific pieces, they at least know that certain operas exist, and that if they're still being performed they must at least be a little good. The Magic Flute, The Barber of Seville, and a few other Mozarts have this level of recognition. Puccini's La Bohème – the story of doomed bohemians in love – is another one of these.
La Bohème is part of the standard opera repertoire, this most recent production being the fourth time that NZ Opera have performed it since the turn of the millennium, and it is regarded as one of the best operas of all time. You might also be familiar with it as the basis for the musical Rent, but La Bohème remains a far more interesting take on the source material, as it is loosely adapted from Henri Murger's Scenes de la vie de Bohème, which nobody reading this has read. (By the way, calling La Bohème a more interesting version of Rent is a surefire way to piss off fans of both shows.)
Director Brad Cohen's new take on the show relocates it to Paris in 1947 – one of those oddly specific directorial setting choices that seems trendy in this artform – but otherwise feels fairly safe. For opera, it is a remarkably small scale story. Men hang out, men fall in love, woman gets sick, woman gets sicker, people get sadder. While there are a few moments where the stage is flooded by the ensemble, for the most part we remain with our core cast.
Some of the singing seems oddly underpowered, sometimes lost under the orchestra. The men in the cast suffer the most here, stuck in the uncanny valley between mimicking the physicality of dudes hanging out with each other with the need to play out to the massive venue. As the doomed Mimi, Elena Perroni fares better, helped along by a gorgeous blue dress that seems to absorb the light, and a florid physicality that immediately defines the character. However, it's Emma Pearson as Musetta, easily the most fun character in the show, who stands out. She plays all the colours of the character, her darkness and her frippery, in a way that fills the stage rather than occupies it, but she also finds intimate moments that really stick out. There is one simple gesture toward the end of the show, a flick of a hand, that was so small and so specifically human, but still stood out in the massive space.
'Why do we go to the opera?' is a question I find myself asking when I see any opera, which is perhaps an unfair thing to ask of any one show. I don't watch an episode of Severance or say, even Family Guy, and ponder the value of TV as an artform. Opera is, however, a form that I am still very much in the process of understanding, and by proxy, truly appreciating. What I love about it is the spectacle, the fact that you can see every dollar onstage, and see what happens when art is supported to achieve that spectacle. Opera is a big artform, it involves human beings going large to achieve human truths even larger.
La Bohème, or at least this production of it, is not what I go to the opera for. There is an intimacy to it that is lost in the Kiri Te Kanawa, and while the set strikes an initial gorgeous image – like the memory of a Parisian apartment in 1947 dropped in a sack onto the stage, complete with a sunlight hanging over them – the effect is lessened. Similarly, the moments of snow falling from the sky is also initially impressive, even moving, but becomes less effective on repetition.
The tension of this intimacy is felt by the entire production (and perhaps this is the fault of the libretto). The moments where the ensemble come onstage feel obligatory rather than organic, and Chris McRae's delightful clown Parpignol, who entertains some children, is as much a jarring intrusion as his inclusion in the second to last paragraph of this review. I wondered what La Bohème might feel like in a more intimate space, whether a theatre like the ASB Waterfront or even Q's Rangatira could capture the small moments at the heart of this show.
The show feels unfortunately inert, stuck on this massive stage rather than reaching out to grab us in the stalls. As a result, I felt similarly unmoved. I appreciate the beauty, the music, and what spectacle there is, but it sits at such a distance from me that it might as well be a sculpture. As with all opera, the human truths are there, but I wish I didn't have to squint to see them.