Results tagged “boheme” from Slipped disc

Two nights late due to snowfall and a dozen years after he last held the stage, Jonathan Miller's production of Boheme opened last night at English National Opera. It was about forty watts short of full power.

Miller, as he made clear, shifted the setting to Brassai's monochrome 1930s Paris of stony-eyed tarts and wall-faced punters. The visuals worked well on the whole and Isabella Bywater's gray-white colour scheme was seasonally apt.

The flaw was Miller's decision to position Rodolfo and his chums not as struggling artists but as spoilt Withnail rich kids who are slumming it as bohos for a couple of years before sprucing up for a job in Daddy's business. That conceit, eliminating existential need, created an artificiality in the love relationships and cost the show  heavily in emotional impact. The hankies did not come out until very late in Act Four.

Alfie Boe was a sweet-voiced, unimposing Rodolfo while Melody Moore sang a serviceable Mimi who never occupies centre stage. Roland Wood was a restrained Marcello, his restraint the more obvious for the exuberance of Hanan Alattar's Musetta. This Lebanese-American soprano, on debut, is definitely one to watch. Miguel Hart-Bedoya conducted, inflexibly for my taste. There was no rubato, no hint of momentary inspiration in any quarter.

I wonder whether television was not partly to blame for the feeling that we were at a general rehearsal rather than a first night. The show was filmed, front stage and back, on two channels of Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV. Was it in order to manage the close-ups that the lights dimmed on stage at crucial moments, casting Rodolfo and Mimi's faces in shadow through scenes of love and parting? Is the Coliseum on an energy-saving scheme? 

More light, I wanted to shout. Where the hell is Goethe when we really need him?

No matter: Boheme will run and run, at www.eno.org

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English National Opera are offering best seats for tomorrow's opening night of Jonathan Miller's new Boheme for as little as £20 - a saving of £59 they shout, in a last-minute email.

Just click online - www.eno.org - and you could be rubbing shoulders with the Great and the Good - you know, like the new chairman of the Arts Council, a gaggle of critics, some out-of-work actors and leading insolvency practitioners.

The premiere night has, admittedly, been postponed by two nights because of snow (let's not go there again).

But if ENO are having to give away best seats to its top draw for as little as one Adam Smith note (about $27 in greenbacks) it's not just the snow that's keeping folks at home. This could be turning into a box-office winter of severe discontent.

For the first time I can remember, an opera premiere in London has been cancelled by severe weather. The snow is six inches thick on the ground and Jonathan Miller's keenly awaited return to the Coliseum will have to be awaited until Wednesday, as English National Opera cannot guarantee getting its employees - let alone the audience - safely home to bed.

Such a shame. Three thousand people could have sung along to 'your tiny hand is frozen'.

Whatever happened to Spirit of the Blitz?