You can make it through the first 25 minutes of La Bohème, with effort.  I did it, on only my third try, and so you can too.

Concentrate, and hope for a melody or an interesting story to emerge later. (One of these two things does, indeed, emerge later.)  Drink and/or smoke something, and persevere.  At 24:47 they begin their first song, so hang in there.

I had the 2009 show from Madrid up and running, and it was not impossible to watch.

Twice before, I had failed to endure the Met’s 2018 Bohème video because Michael Fabiano, trying to play Rodolfo, looks too much like a sharp investment banker.  Anyone that cool-looking, articulate, clever, tall, and thin would not be writing poems in a frozen apartment. 

No, he would be dealing high-coupon bonds, working four screens at once from his yacht, with three sexy assistants processing call option orders for him.  So maybe that would be an interesting slant on Bohème for 2025; you first heard it here.  Go for it, Michael F.

This Madrid Rodolfo looks a little like Pavarotti, so, not poor, but at least pathetic. 

Pooch had two “librettists” putting the text together for him, but all they could come up with was this sort of thing (which any one of us could have crafted better using Siri while driving in traffic).

Be careful on the stairs. Hold on to the banister. Careful. It’s pitch dark.

It’s so cold in here. Sit by the fire. Wait. A little wine. Like that? Thank you.

Here we begin to wonder why we are listening to this, and we’re considering queuing up a rousing Donizetti or Offenbach, to keep the oxygen circulating.

Puccini, like R Strauss, communicated, through his operas, a weird take on women and relationships, though the lightning-fast bonding of Rodolfo and Mimi is certainly not unique to Puccini.  If we can accept that Magic Flute’s Tamino falls in love with Pamina by glancing at her photo, then anything goes.

The discomfort here starts with the notion that Rodolfo and Mimi are neighbors who have never met, but when they first see each other, the room is dark, cold, and smelly, and that’s good enough for new romance.  Tricky Mimi blows her candle back out, a ploy to stay and get another light from Rod.  He’s sophisticated too: he hides her key, a suave move which traps Mimi into helping him search.

Okay, and we probably saw that happen on TV in “Love, American Style” (1971), but it wasn’t really very funny, though obviously a cartoon view of romance.  The ‘chini guy never saw that show, so I guess we give him a pass.

So finally they get going with some conversation.  Rodolfo offers to explain to his new friend “who he is, what he does, and how he lives”.  It’s an opera, so Mimi is interested in this information.  He’s a poet, with no money, no food, no heat, no family, no side hustle.  She loves it.  She endears herself to him by explaining that she can sew things.  This Mimi (Inva Mula, from Albania) looks a little like Renée Fleming.

Couple of great songs here.  She sings about how she likes the early dawn, springtime, flowers, and the place where she lives. I don’t like the music, but it is certainly a valid song.  Now we’re up and running for sure.

A highlight is the street party scene, where they have actual jugglers and stilt people on stage. Nice.  Not as out-there as in Bartered Bride, but good.

The best music is where the street sweepers show up at the gate at daybreak, singing.  It merges into a soprano chorus which is also a pretty nice song.  It’s about the morning and the sunrise; everybody together now.  This is the part of the score that comes closest to being an actual melody.

From here on it is a heavily romantic, tragic story, much like Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, which he had written two years earlier.  Mimi sticks it out with Rodolfo as long as she can, but she’s getting sick, and Rodolfo’s poetry business is not thriving.  Like Manon, Mimi switches off to a richer guy, but returns to Rodolfo out of love.  Yes, we have heard this story before.

Then she “does a Violetta”.  Consumed by consumption, she fades away in poor Rodolfo’s terrible apartment, singing beautifully.   One roommate looks a little like David Bayne.  Another looks a little like a deepwater game fish.  The other roommate does not remind me of anything, and in fact he is irrelevant to the plot.

There is no music in La Bohème that you would sing along with, or even remember after 1 minute.  This music gets points for being grand, sweeping, and tough on the orchestra, maybe, but not for enjoyment or for energy. 

Along with Strauss, Puccini liked to shoot out little bits and scraps of music, to go behind the simplistic dialog generated by the so-called librettists.  I repeat: there is really no reason to layer music onto this stage play.  It’s a solid romantic story, a tear-jerker, even, except for too many deaths by consumption. (One.)

So, two hours down.  That was not easy.  But some challenges in life must be met and endured.  So it is with the famous La Bohème.

In conclusion, the words of two great observers of opera come to mind:

“Nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts.” (Mark Twain, inadvertently foreshadowing Puccini’s work)

“It was okay. I would not choose, myself, to spend time or money to listen to that type of music again.” (Cameron Fuller)