As glad as I was to be viewing art in person again, it would be a lie to say that everything was back to normal. I saw PNB’s Singularly Cerrudo a few weeks ago, and Jesus Christ Superstar at the Paramount after that. La Bohème is my third time in a theater since the pandemic shut things down last year, and my second in McCaw Hall. We put up with it because Puccini’s music is so beautiful. Of course Mimi dies, because it’s Puccini. The novel was more a collection of vignettes than a story, but the play introduced the plot of Mimi and Rodolfo’s doomed relationship. The libretto is based on a play based on the novel, Scènes de la vie de bohème. Puccini’s story of four young struggling artists in Paris in the 19th century is so iconic that people who have never seen or heard it know it’s general outlines. La Bohème is one of the most widely known operas in the world. When I saw it years later in Seattle, it made me cry again. I saw it in London on a trip I took in memory of my grandmother and it made me cry. With the exception of a widely panned traveling production of Carmen assigned by my high school music teacher, La Bohème was the first opera I ever watched. Photo: Sunny Martini c/o Seattle Opera La Bohème But now they’re back on stage at McCaw Hall with the long-delayed La Bohème. Seattle Opera heroically transformed into a film company and put together a season unlike any other last year. Well, we all know how that May turned out. La Bohème was supposed to conclude the 2019/2020 opera season with a run of performances in May 2020. A year and a half later than expected, La Bohème will finally reappear at Seattle Opera.
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