Back by popular demand, as they say, Jonathan Miller’s La bohème, in its nth reincarnation (there’s plenty of life in it yet), opens the English National Opera new season at the London Coliseum on the centenary of Puccini’s death.
Revival director Crispin Lord’s production (which I also saw in early 2022) strikes a good balance between the joy of letting one’s hair down in Montmartre and the plight of its impoverished denizens, transplanted from the nineteenth century to a grimy grey Paris in the 1930s, when consumption still wielded its scythe.
Four penniless friends, painter Marcello, poet Rodolfo, scholar Colline and musician Schaunard, are freezing in their garret, unable to pay their rent. A great team, they look out for each other, sharing any small good fortune that comes their way.
Outwitting their landlord, Benoît (a lovely turn from Paul Sheehan), they decide to celebrate at the busy Café Momus with the tiny bit of money Schaunard has earned playing to a dying parrot—the opera is full of charming wit.
Rodolfo says he’ll come later. Is this his lucky day, or Mimi’s? Or has she planned it all? Looking for a light for her candle (is that a metaphor?), she drops her key, he finds it, though pretends not to. And their instant infatuation flares up like a brief candle.
Mimi (Nadine Benjamin, whom we already know from her performances in Blue, The Handmaid’s Tale, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, amongst others) invites herself to go with Rodolfo to join his friends. He buys her a beret, she wants a necklace—the girl isn’t a wilting wallflower in Benjamin’s interpretation.
Mimi already has a cough. Her seamstress job doesn't bring in much. She needs a rich benefactor. Marcello’s on-off lover Musetta demonstrates the benefits of that at Café Momus in a delightful scene of male manipulation, poor Alcindoro (Andrew Tinkler).
But, the winter and galloping consumption take their toll: though still in love Rodolfo can’t cope with watching Mimi fade. She has to follow Musetta’s lead as a lady of questionable morals. Poverty can’t afford to be choosy.
A concerned Musetta brings a very ill Mimi to the artists’ attic in desperation. They do what they can, Colline pawns his coat, Musetta her jewels to pay for a doctor and buy her gloves to warm those freezing hands. To no avail. Musetta and the three young men grieve for and with Rodolfo. Their acting is superb, the direction subtle, it stabs deep into the heart.
There are several in the cast who are making their ENO debuts: tenor Joshua Blue as Rodolfo, soprano Vuvu Mpofu as Musetta, bass-baritone Dingle Yandell as Colline (wonderful aria to his overcoat). Baritone, ENO Harewood Artist, Patrick Alexander Keefe’s Schaunard has oodles of charm. Together, the male foursome is pure delight—excellent rapport, joshing and blocking, voices blending.
Baritone Charles Rice is reprising his Marcello from 2022, and both he and Mpofu’s Musetta outstrip the lead couple (fine-voiced though they each are, the chemistry is just not there). The contrast is striking. Their quartet outside the café where Marcello has found some temporary work, when Rice and Mpofu split in anger and Rodolfo and Mimi reconcile, is splendid. But Benjamin’s voice in its lower registers occasionally gets lost—in character?
For a family audience, the best are the busy bustling scenes outside Café Momus, children pestering parents and toy seller Parpignol (Adam Sullivan), who looks a mix of Charlie Chaplin and Fernandel. The ENO chorus is superlative, as always, as are the children from St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School—really tremendous.
Isabella Bywater’s set design, that attic, those narrow grey streets, its revolving tenements, sustains Miller’s bleak vision. Conductor Clelia Cafiero, making her debut in the UK, draws subtlety and emotion from the orchestra, a stalwart of ENO. We are so lucky to have them.
Two halves of under an hour each fly by, and we with them, on a current of hopeful romance, stark realism and musical magic. Rodolfo weeps, as do those final dying chords. The death scene is very moving.
Lightness and dark, the ups and downs of life, Puccini’s popular music sweetens with its harmonies. La bohème is very Victor Hugo, with something of Alexandre Dumas, though it’s actually taken from Henri Murger’s 1845 Scènes de la vie de bohème.