by Robert Rollin
On Sunday evening, June 10, The Cleveland Opera presented an outstanding production of Puccini’s La bohème at the Ohio Theater in Playhouse Square. An exceptional cast and an exemplary orchestra made for a marvelous evening. Though tragic operas can often be overly melodramatic, Puccini’s sensitively beautiful music elevates the simple story of artists struggling to survive in a Paris to a higher plane. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Arguably one of the most popular operas ever written, Puccini’s La bohéme is third only to Verdi’s La traviata and Bizet’s Carmen in the most-performed-opera-of-all-time category. On Saturday, June 10 at 7:30 pm, The Cleveland Opera will bring the story of those beloved Parisian bohemians to the Ohio Theater in Playhouse Square. Grzegorz Nowak will conduct The Cleveland Opera Orchestra and Chorus. The production will be sung in Italian with English supertitles. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Puccini’s La bohème, probably one of the world’s most performed operas, packs a wallop pretty much every time you hear it. This weekend at Cleveland Opera Theater, that was again the case for me. But the emotional ending isn’t the whole of the opera. In its first three acts (and even in the opening of the fourth), La bohème often seems more comic than tragic, more boisterous than tender. Perhaps its mix of contraries, not just its sentiment, is what makes it so powerful. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
On Friday, April 29 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, May 1 at 3:00 pm at Masonic Auditorium Performing Arts Center, Cleveland Opera Theater will present Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème, directed by Scott Skiba. Conducted by Domenico Boyagian, the opera will be sung in Italian with English subtitles.
Puccini’s opera centers around the writer Rodolfo, the painter Marcello, the musician Schaunard, and the philosopher Colline, who are roommates in an attic apartment in Paris’s Latin Quarter. On Christmas Eve, Schaunard decides to treat his three friends to a night out at Café Momus.
Rodolfo stays behind, and is surprised a few minutes later by a knock at the door. It is the charming seamstress Mimì who lives in a neighboring apartment. Rodolfo later joins his friends with Mimì in tow, but things heat up when Marcello’s on-again, off-again flame Musetta arrives to cause a scene. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
On Friday, April 29 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, May 1 at 3:00 pm at Masonic Auditorium Performing Arts Center, Cleveland Opera Theater will present Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème, directed by Scott Skiba. Conducted by Domenico Boyagian, the opera will be sung in Italian with English subtitles.
“It’s going to be an exciting production,” Skiba said during a recent conversation. “It’s easy to take it for granted and say, yeah, it’s La bohème, but when you’re working on it and discovering new things in it, it just strikes you how rich it is at every turn. And Puccini’s music is so wonderful. At every rehearsal I look over at Domenico and say ‘This music is so good!’” [Read more…]