La boheme @ McCaw Hall
We caught La boheme at McCaw Hall Wednesday night and the place was packed. We haven't had a chance to revisit the venue since an old friend of our's who did the Opera's phone sales got us in to the preview rehearsal performance of Parsifal right before McCaw Hall's grand opening four years ago, the first and only time we ever made it down there. The only opera we've seen since then is the over-rated Trapped in the Closet, which isn't one-tenth as funny as everybody says it is (yet still worth watching, however). So obviously we're completely unqualified to comment on an opera of this magnitude, but we'll note this for the record:
The music conveys specific emotions (youthful longing, drunken confidence, fetishized heartbreak) more powerfully than language and seems to exist on some other level of conciousness entirely, such that it can't be described by the feeble blogging abilities of Seattlest.
The art direction and set design are awe inspiring; granted the only other real opera we've seen, the aforementioned Parsifal, required a bigger more bombastic production to service its narrative (at one point the entire stage from end to end rotated up in to the air on its side, threatening to crush the audience to death; at another point, this huge tower that looked like it was three stories high, collapsed suddenly down in to the stage, in the span of a few seconds), but La boheme requires more subtle nuances, like the fading light in the skylights of the loft in Act One or the slowly dissipating fog in the background painting of Act Three. The outdoor urban scene in Act Two looked like a porcelain Christmas ornament suddenly animated.
La boheme is also incredibly funny. The simultaneous conversations in Act Two with the overlapping schemes of former lovers Marcello and Musetta at cross-purposes interweaves with hordes of brats chasing a guy on stilts and Musetta's hilarious waltz-aria about her own popularity. She dispenses with her sugar daddy by complaining about her shoes (oh my god shoes) hurting her feet and sends him off to get her more shoes. (Shoes.) At one point she sweeps her boa over a seated Marcello and it dangles between his legs. She slowly pulls the boa up tauntingly and he eventually loses it and grabs the tail end of and huffs, inadvertently toking on his own crotch stink. In Act Three the reconciliation of Rodolfo and Mimi takes place contrapuntally with Marcello and Musetta's futile attempt at breaking up. As the program guide states, "Puccini was a genius of concision."
The only thing even vaguely unsatisfying was the simplicity of the plot: boy meets girl, girl gets sick, girl dies, the end. Two hours and forty minutes. But so what? La boheme isn't so much about plot as it is about subtle, mind-bending music and gut-wrenching, emotional performances that subsume language to the point that glancing up at the subtitles eventually becomes unnecessary. Plus, it's great not to be the oldest person in the room for a change.
