CURTAIN CALLS
Richard Ouzounian finds Venus In Fur fascinating, but La Boheme remake, right, falls far short of the mark,
La Bohème
(out of 4) By Giaccomo Puccini. Directed by John Caird. Until Oct. 30 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145 Queen St. W. 416-363-8231.
When a production of La Bohème finds me dry-eyed at the final curtain, something is wrong.
I didn’t have to reach for my handkerchief once on Thursday night when the Canadian Opera Company opened their season with a new staging of Puccini’s beloved opera.
It certainly wasn’t the fault of the cast, whose voices did total justice to the material. Neither did the problem lie with the COC orchestra, whose sound was lush and full throughout, although occasionally pushed into the bombastic by conductor Carlo Rizzi.
I’m afraid I was left out in the cold by the directorial choices of John Caird and the work of his designers, David Farley (set and costumes) and Michael James Clark (lighting).
They all have the best of intentions, but what sounds good in theory doesn’t always translate as well to the stage.
Caird’s major concept was that the young men in the love story, notably Rodolfo the poet and Marcello the painter, would be using the events of the opera as the raw material of their art.
It’s a fascinating notion, but it means Rodolfo is frequently scrib- bling down what’s going on between him and Mimi as it happens, which is as annoying as someone tweeting during lovemaking.
And when Marcello is frantically sketching Mimi’s passing only a few feet from her deathbed, you wonder why someone didn’t rip the paper out of his hands. I fully believe these men would have turned this tragic love story into painting and poetry, but not while it was happening to them.
It does give the four inhabitants of the garret a sense of unity and the two more minor characters, Christian Van Horne’s philosopher Colline and Phillip Addis’s musician, Schaunard, have more texture here than usual.
But it winds up feeling a bit like a 19th-century version of The Big Bang Theory, with the women playing second fiddle to the buddy-boy bonding.
Still, a sounder physical production might have overcome these flaws.
La Bohème has a fascinating structure, but one that is the despair of directors and designers. It’s in four acts, beginning and ending in the artists’ garret, where we get to know them as people and see our central couple fall in love.
The middle two acts (at the Café Momus and the gates of Paris) give us a broader canvas, which simultaneously shows us the world these people live in and lets us see why it’s so hard for them to survive in it.
If it were a movie, Acts I and IV would be in close-up, while Acts II and III were in wide-shot.
Understandably anxious to liberate us from a three-intermission evening, Caird and Farley used two giant turn- tables: garret on one side, café and city gates on the other. Sounds great, but it means the four bohemian boys are suddenly living in a space that sprawls across the stage and makes you feel they’d have to use carrier pigeons to communicate. It’s supposed to be the kind of claustrophobic atmosphere that acts as a petri dish for emotion, but in this production it’s like the loft from hell. It also means that the Café sequence, which should sprawl out and fill the stage with life, becomes decidedly cramped, with everyone pretty much wedged to the same place throughout and not quite enough room for the boisterous ensemble activity called for. (The COC chorus, as always, sounds splendid, especially the children.) Caird also ignores the fact that the first two acts take place on Christmas Eve, which is the only reason that everyone from a crowd of urchins to a peripatetic toyseller to a marching military band are filling the streets of Paris.
And while I know that Paris isn’t quite Toronto, I’d like to think everyone would be dealing with the cold a lot more than they do. It’s not Christmas Eve on the Left Bank, it’s Nuit Blanche gone Gallic.
This La Bohème isn’t one of those wilfully misguided misinterpretations that ruin an evening. Caird wasn’t out to cause mayhem. But sometimes, alas, things can go awry anyway.
La Bohème.