La Boheme is a metatheatrical Opera. The protagonist Rodolfo is a playwright who at top of show burns his own manuscript as an evocation of new adventure, “A great loss menaces posterity”. He destroys his narrative so he can live out a new story. This parallel between living your life and writing your life is also brought up when Rodolfo introduces Mimi to his friends “she is poetry and I am just a poet”. Rodolfo tries to close the space between living the drama and scripting it.
We don’t watch a sensuous love story like La Boheme because it’s believable. We watch because it models the epic romance we crave while also demonstrating that idealized love is never more than a self-produced story. Understanding these narratives as a construction opens up the possibility that we could build a similar fantasy to live out in our own lives. It’s achievable aspiration.
I decided to set my production of Boheme in 1940s Hollywood. The sensuous score reminded me of movies like Casa Blanca, or Gone with the Wind. The themes of a ‘constructed story’ made me think of film sets, where a western saloon can boarder a tropical island. Romance that can transcend its own artificiality made me think of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, lovers both on and off screen.
The design utilizes the system of wagons in the Metropolitan Opera to create one long pan shot that takes us from a soundstage in act 1 through a studio backlot in act 2. Finally, in act 3 we pan past the entire set and find Mimi drifting through a large infinity cyc.
