On Saturday night, Washington National Opera opened its fall season with an oh-so-edgy rendition of a tired old chestnut, Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. It is the fifth mounting of this opera by WNO since 1984, which works out to a production every four or five years on average. Film director Mariusz Treliński created this new production for the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw, which also gave Washington his Butterfly and Andrea Chénier. The aim, laudable if misguided, was to create an image of opera somehow appealing to that infinitely desirable cadre of potential ticket buyers, young adults who have never been to an opera.
If we are to take the world evoked by this Bohème at face value, those mysterious young future opera-goers are slender and reasonably attractive and regularly raid their seemingly endless wardrobes of trendy, tailored clothing before going to neon-lit clubs. They also wear silly costumes, enjoy vaguely smutty, transsexual floor shows, and shoot videos of each other, which all sounds a little too much like the last DCist staff party. Curiously, they bear little resemblance to the desperately poor Bohemians of Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica’s libretto. The story is based on episodes from Henry Murger’s classic novel Scènes de la vie de bohème, which in fact is not about a loft full of pretty metrosexuals.
Because the singers were chosen more for their tender age and good looks, we are obliged to start there. Tenor Vittorio Grigolo (Rodolfo) and soprano Nicole Cabell (Musetta) have both traded on their striking physiques to sell solo albums of dubious musical worth, and they are beautiful to watch live. It must have been possible, however, to find a Mimi more like a supermodel than Adriana Damato. The closeup headshots and video of the Italian soprano, the latter shot handheld in real time by Rodolfo, were not particularly forgiving. To complete the lead quartet, one could only wonder what Cabell’s Musetta saw in the diminutive, nerdy photographer Marcello of Korean baritone Hyung Yun, over whom she towered. If you think this is harsh, read Tim Page’s take-down in the Post.
Photo of Adriana Damato and Cast in La Bohème, Washington National Opera, 2007, by Karin Cooper
