The rest of the cast – Anton Berezin, Glenn Hill, Marty Alix – each have highlights, and Alix is particularly funny performing a joke song about the tortured devotions of doglove, but it’s the free-flowing ensemble performance that lingers.
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Elegant set design, uplifting choric interludes, restrained movement that never resorts to stage business, the seamless way each performer shares the role of narrator/composer – everything seems to click under Parke’s direction.
It’s easy to imagine Elegies performed concert-style for the songs or being reduced to sentimentality in an undisciplined production. This new company delivers a fully realised theatrical experience that should gladden the hearts of more discerning musical theatre fans.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
OPERA
La Boheme ★★★★
Opera Australia touring program, Drum Theatre, July 12
Puccini’s La Boheme is one of the best-loved operas of all time, always ranking in the top five in surveys of the most performed. This is easy to understand, given its emotional power and beauty, and Opera Australia realised both emphatically at the Drum Theatre.
Puccini’s La Boheme is one of the best-loved operas of all time.Credit: Jeff Busby
La Boheme portrays the tumultuous love story of Rodolfo and Mimi, and of their fellow struggling artists in 1830s Paris. This was the opening night of OA’s touring program, which will take the production as far afield as Tennant Creek and regional centres in several states.
The production features a truncated orchestra and a small, flexible (but amusingly authentic) set, and OA has assembled a really fine group of singers, led by John Longmuir, who dominated the evening with his purity and power as Rodolfo. Shane Lowrencev (Colline) is another OA regular, but most of the cast are emerging singers of considerable talent: Danita Weatherstone, a tender and affecting Mimi; Cathy Di Zhang a high-powered and sultry Musetta; and Andrew Williams and Michael Lampard as Marcello and Schaunard.
The staging has moved forward by over a century to the 1970s, apparently inspired by director Dean Bryant’s years of impecunious struggle as a drama student – without ill effect except that the candles, central props in Act I, are incoherent in the age of electricity.
Perhaps Simon Bruckard, who did a masterful job of reducing Puccini’s score to 13 musicians and conducted with great sensitivity, should have invented a few lines about a power failure.
Eugene Raggio as Alcindoro and Cathy-Di Zhang as Musetta.Credit: Jeff Busby
Of course, opera as an art form demands the suspension of belief anyway – people don’t sing their way through their lives accompanied by an orchestra – but paradoxically Puccini’s genius is such that he convinces entirely. This was my 10th Boheme: I invariably leak tears at the end, so affecting is the music, and I did again.
In each town, OA has recruited local children to take part. In Dandenong, the unbearably cute children’s chorus came from the Keerthana Music School. This production is a great advertisement as OA attracts new and far-flung audiences.
Reviewed by Barney Zwartz
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