MUSIC

Tobacco Factory, Bristol (11-22 Oct)

For his Glyndebourne production which has just been revived for UK touring, David McVicar relocated Murger’s Bohemians to the present day, complete with laptops and dodgy electrics. Opera Project is content to let the piece be; garreted in 19th-century Paris, and staged with unfussy, gimmick-free directness. It’s a strategy that worked for the wonderful 'Tosca' at Tobacco Factory a few years back with Amanda Echalaz, and pretty much delivers here - even if the laddishness of Act 1 can wear thin, especially when the temptation to leap on to a chair or bed to deliver a hearty volley at the drop of a downbeat proves hard to resist. Of course there’s a fine line. The boisterous high spirits have to give it large to show the full maturing extent of the journey as the friends hover around Mimi’s deathbed at the end. And with a young cast, Opera Project had a flying advantage; these Bohemians actually looked (and sounded) the part - no 16-stone lard-arse singing about being perpetually hungry here! There’s a real charm and innocence to Rodolfo’s first meeting with Mimi (though concentrating on the singers, conductor Jonathan Lyness didn’t quite tease out the full dramatic acuity of Puccini’s orchestral underpinning - even if his reduction of the score for a dozen players is a triumph).

Like Mimi’s ‘tiny hand’, musically things warmed up, and with director Richard Studer swelling the numbers as a harassed waiter straight out of a ‘Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares’, the Cafe Momus Act 11 snapped into life with Catrin Aur’s shrewish Musetta flirting for all she was worth and, sugar daddy disposed of, kissing Marcello with the voraciousness of a polar bear on steroids.

She’s a telling foil to the creamy lyricism of Victoria Joyce’s fragile Mimi whose ill-fated trajectory is touchingly unfolded. As Rodolfo, Robyn Lyn Evans goes for the Italianate heft with gusto, though the idiomatic ‘catches’ often sound a tad ‘sprayed on’ when applied to an English translation - mind you, what’s a singer to do: damned if he does; damned if he doesn’t! Between daubing a fifth-rate copy of Monet’s Gare St-Lazare, James Cleverton’s Marcello impressed with a very human nobility and compassion - especially in the last act when Bullingdon club bread fights give way to the harrowing reappearance of Mimi. With the ‘shrew’ tamed into the very model of solicitous concern, and Rodolfo in denial, 'La Boheme' ended with a gut-wrenching blow to the solar plexus - just as it must; the Tobacco Factory audience wrapped around the deathbed not as onlookers but participants. (Paul Riley)

Copyright Paul Riley 2011