‘La bohème’ @ The Dallas Opera
Photos by Kyle Flubacker
—Wayne Lee Gay
The Dallas Opera closes its 2024-25 season with Puccini's La bohème, one of the opera world's most reliable crowd-pleasers and ticket-sellers. And there's good reason for that particular opera's status: inspired melodies, lovable characters, rich orchestrations, and a multi-layered, beautifully structured plot line that anyone who has ever been in love, lost a loved one, or been joyfully young can relate to.
This current production in many ways repeats Dallas Opera's production of 2019, with sets originally designed by Erhard Rom for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Tomer Zulun, who served as stage director for that 2019 production, also returns. Rom's scenery creates a sense of depth and the spacious energy of urban life, magically combined with the intimacy and financial poverty of the garret's four resident bohemians. The Act II carnival glows with warm, exciting reds and oranges. Rom and costume designer, the late Peter J. Hall, chose to push the setting up from Paris in the 1830s to the belle epoque Paris of the 1890s, contemporary with the moment at which Puccini composed the work.
This serves the theme in general, with, however a few anachronisms sneaking in, including a salute to King Louis-Philippe (long dead and gone by the 1890s) and Marcello's choice of heroic historical themes for his paintings (not likely for a young artist in the era of Renoir).
La bohème is, of course, famously rich in opportunities for any one of the prinipals (as well as those in comprimario roles) to shine. Soprano Emily Pogorelc as the flighty Musetta owns her moment in the spotlight most brilliantly, bringing an almost over-the-top aura of high comedy to the famous waltz-aria in Act II. Uzbeki Tenor Bekhzod Davronov brings a brilliant tone as Rodolfo, with an occasional losss of focus in the upper register; Japanese baritone Takaoki Onishi delivers a beautifully resonant timbre as Marcello. William Guanbo Su’s tender, rich bass as Colline provides another high point in his brief Act IV aria. And Su, Davronov, Onishi, and baritone Efraín Solís as Schounard form a brilliant and exemplary ensemble as the four struggling, starving and eternally optimistic companions.
Doubling in the two hapless-old-man roles of Benoit and Alcindoro, baritone Julien Robbins brings an appropriately comic geriatric presence (and adds a Dallas debut to his list of 600 operatic performances in a career of forty-plus years). Texas-born, Yale-trained soprano Sylvia D'Eramo portrays the doomed Mimi with a warm quality that opens up nicely at key moments.
But the real musical star of this production is TDO conductor Emmanuel Villaume. Here, Villaume once again demonstrates his astounding sense of the way words, music, and underlying meaning join and meld in opera. Every aria becomes a duet between singer and orchestra; the singers deliver the words, while Villaume and orchestra reveal, in purely musical terms, an added level of emotion in this evergreen tale of love, loss, and transformation.
WHEN: February 28-March 9, 2025
WHERE: Winspear Opera House, Dallas
WEB: dallasopera.org
