Past Production Reviews
8The universality of its central themes of love and loss are easy enough to relate to; the Artistic Director of the ENO, Daniel Kramer, credits La Bohème’s prevailing popularity with the decision to restage its “near-perfect equilibrium between realism and romanticism, comedy and pathos, at whose heart lies the relationship between the forlorn couple of Rodolfo and Mimi”.https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-la-boheme-london-coliseum-3/
First seen in 2009, Miller’s Bohème nudges the action forward some 100 years to the ‘années folles’ of the 1920s. Café Momus becomes an edgy guinguette where Fitzgerald and André Breton might have traded writing tips with Rodolfo, and a Josephine Baker-esque Musetta (Nadine Benjamin) holds the stage. It’s a neat sleight-of-hand, nicely framed in Isabella Bywater’s revolving sets — an unobtrusive restoring of operatic order after Benedict Andrews’s teenage rebellion of a crack-den Bohème for ENO in 2015.
The prospect of Natalya Romaniw making her role debut as Cio-Cio-san at English National Opera has given the latest revival of Anthony Minghella’s 2005 production of Madam Butterfly an added flutter. The Welsh soprano has been building an impressive career in bringing opera’s tragic women to life in a startlingly vivid way; the uniquely awful story of the heart-broken Japanese girl who commits ritual suicide – albeit inauthentically – was always likely to be movingly depicted in Romaniw’s hands and indeed this was an absolute triumph.
This is the third or fourth time I have seen Anthony Minghella's stunningly gorgeous production of Puccini's Madam Butterfly at the London Coliseum and in many ways it is the best. Revival director Glen Sheppard has made some delightful tweaks that make Minghella's vision even more effective and the title role is sung by Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw in gloriously impressive style.
Mimi’s sickbed is the floor of her transit van. Rodolfo sits hunched against a wheel outside, the closest he dare get to his dying lover. Musetta makes her showy arrival in a convertible Merc, and an old ice-cream van serves as the Cafe Momus. Trailer-trash stagings are nothing new – many an old camper van has been rolled on to an operatic stage – but here we’re in a proper car park, this unparalleled season’s venue of choice for high art.
A feature of this La bohème is that some characters come up or down from the stage or roam around the parked cars and indeed Rodolfo’s first entrance is when he cycles back from his part-time job delivering takeaways. He hopes to be a playwright but earns additional money writing newspaper reviews. Home isn’t a Parisian garret but a Volkswagen campervan in a car park much the same as the opera was being performed in. It is surrounded by a couple of others and appears to be part of a commune of some sort peopled by those at the fringes of society.
