Constantine Costi's new La Bohème for Opera Australia arrives with a reasonable pedigree and an understandable brief: replace Gale Edwards' decade-old workhorse with something that justifies the cost of a fresh production. The result is a show that works in spite of itself — undone in its middle section by the very ambition that makes it interesting, then saved by the same director's instinct for emotional restraint when the story demands it. Puccini's opera is a structural trap. It has no villain, no plot machinery to drive it, and its power lives entirely in the audience's attachment to characters they've loved for barely forty minutes before watching them suffer. Any production that substitutes spectacle for that attachment is gambling with the wrong currency. Costi knows this — which makes Act Two's maximalist carnival all the more baffling. Set designer Dann Barber and costume designer Sabina Myers pile Virgin Marys, carnival creatures, nuns, masks and a giant papier-mache cardinal onto a stage that already has nowhere to breathe. The references — Chagall, Méliès — are intelligent. The result is illegible. When you can't find Musetta in the crowd, you've lost the scene. The first act, by contrast, is handled with real intelligence. Barber's decision to compress the garret into a small box framed by black curtains is exactly right — the Bohemians literally trip over each other, which is both funny and true to the cramped misery of the life being depicted. The transition onto the full stage, lovers winched up on a timber scaffold over Paris, is the production's single most beautiful image. Galina Cheplakova's Mimi arrives here and announces herself immediately: her opening aria's top register is genuinely sublime, the trills dropping through the air like the snow the story keeps threatening. Cheplakova carries the production on her back and doesn't drop it. She shimmers in her thin coat at the beginning and hollows convincingly by the end — the physical storytelling matches the vocal. Kang Wang's Rodolfo is underpowered early, the voice lacking presence in the lower register, but he improves substantially and their final scenes together are genuinely moving. Luke Gabbedy's Marcello is excellent throughout, credibly loyal and funny despite being saddled with a wig that the review describes, accurately, as Warwick Capper-adjacent. Alexandra Flood's Musetta is sharp and pragmatic. David Parkin as Colline is singled out for good reason. Finnegan Downie Dear conducts Orchestra Victoria with suppleness — the woodwinds in particular do fine work, and the Opera Australia chorus is powerful enough to earn the scale the production keeps reaching for. The final two acts vindicate Costi's directorial instincts: a third-act winter tableau of real bleakness, Rodolfo's confession to Marcello overheard by Mimi in a scene of aching precision, and a death sequence calibrated without sentimentality. The design retreats and the story does the work it was always going to do, if the production would only get out of its way. This is a Bohème that gets the important things right and one important thing very wrong. The wrong thing is expensive and visible and lasts about twenty minutes. The right things are quieter and accumulate. Whether that trade-off is worth your time depends entirely on how much patience you have for the interval between spectacle and feeling.
