Having a good idea for a setting and then reshaping an opera to fit it is brave territory. Questions to ask: does it make sense? Is it coherent? Would the characters seem convincing? For Opera Holland Park, Natascha Metherell has chosen to move Puccini’s La bohème from 19th-century Paris to an Italian film studio of the 1950s. It looks great in Madeleine Boyd’s designs, all mid-century fashion and glamour, mixed with a jumble of costumes as studio extras bustle about as Roman centurions or Egyptian dancing girls. That bustle, though, quickly becomes distracting, taking our attention away from the unfolding love story.
The cluttered studio, we are told, is making a film entitled La Vie Parisienne, set in the Latin Quarter during the Belle Époque. Puccini’s impoverished Rodolfo, Marcello, Colline and Schaunard are transformed respectively into a scriptwriter, a scene painter, a cinematographer and a film composer – a neat idea.
The intense cold they feel is not a bitter Parisian winter but the chill of not being paid for their work. Not such a neat idea. These ‘bohemians’ are not stuck in a garret, burning their plays to keep warm, but in the middle of the studio, grousing about pay. Nobody looks ill-fed or frozen to the marrow. This is, after all, cinema, an industry hardly known for its poverty, despite the current pay disputes in Hollywood.
When the gang depart for Café Momus (the studio canteen. On Christmas Eve?) Mimì the consumptive seamstress, now a wardrobe assistant, implausibly asks Rodolfo for a light for her candle – in a studio ablaze with chunky spotlights. Vocally, though, soprano Katie Bird shines in the role with laser-beam brightness, but why she falls for tenor Adam Gilbert’s Rodolfo is a mystery.
The film idea works best when we are out on the street, with the excellent chorus and children’s choir working their socks off in front of the camera. And the café scene, with soprano Elizabeth Karani at her most outrageous as the impossible Musetta, is suitably chaotic, conductor George Jackson coaxing some excellent playing from the City of London Sinfonia and bringing expert focus to Puccini’s extraordinary conversational kaleidoscope when Colline (Barnaby Rea) and Schaunard (Harry Thatcher) make merry with the throng.
We are still in the studio when the story has moved on and Mimì and Rodolfo are estranged. Musetta and Marcello (baritone Ross Ramgobin, on excellent form) bicker in the way only true lovers recognise, while Rodolfo confesses he has left Mimì because he’s scared she will die. Here, Adam Gilbert produces his best singing, passionate and heartrending, though it’s difficult to believe in his agony when he stands centre-stage with his hands in his pockets.
And that centre-stage seems a long way from the audience. This season, Opera Holland Park retains a runway that wraps around the orchestra, pushing the audience further away but giving an opportunity to bring the singers right down. Bafflingly, Metherell hardly uses it. Surely, the final shattering deathbed scene (in the garret we never see at the opening) would have more impact here than way up on the main stage?
