Light my Làzhú - Opera Orlando's "La Boheme" (2025)

In October 2025, Opera Orlando performed Puccini's La Boheme.  La Boheme is the big daddy of the opera repertoire and may be the world's most performed opera.  British conductor Mark Elder called it a "Monday Night Opera," meaning you could put it on on a random Monday and still pull in a crowd.

Opera Orlando last put on La Boheme in 2017 and, fun fact, that was my first opera experience.  The 2025 production was set in China and featured a principle cast of all Asian and Asian-American performers.

Spoiler: I thought it was fantastic.  La Boheme is popular for a reason, with its compelling music and excellent libretto, and the Opera Orlando production's decision to set it in 1930s Shanghai, in addition to being visually interesting, added some poignant and thought provoking subtext to the story.  The vocal performances and acting were also very powerful.

I'm going to share some of thoughts on the Opera Orlando production in specific and then La Boheme in general.

Background

La Boheme is an Italian opera composed by Giachamo Puccini with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.  It premiered in Turin, Italy in 1896.  It is based on Henri Murger's semi-autobiographical novel Scènes de la vie de bohème (i.e. "Scenes of the Bohemian Life"), published in 1851.  The novel is an episodic collection of stories set in 1840's Paris, inspired by Murger's own life as a starving artist.

(If you aren't aware, a bohemian is "a person (such as a writer or an artist) living an unconventional life usually in a colony with others"  (Merriam-Webster))

Real Life Drama

Puccini's contemporary Ruggero Leoncavallo also wrote a La Boheme based on Murger's novel.  He was writing it at the same time as Puccini, though his version premiered the next year.  Leoncavallo found out over coffee with Puccini that the latter was also writing a Boheme and he lost his mind.  He maintained that Puccini knew he was writing an adaptation of Scenes because Leoncavallo offered him the libretto years earlier, which Puccini denied.  (But it turns out Puccini was probably lying.)  But whether it was a coincidence or something more nefarious, Puccini had scooped Leoncavallo and the two had a flame war in the press.  Puccini ended on "Let him compose, I will compose.  The audience will decide"

Per Nick Reveles, director of Education at San Diego Opera in his OperaTalk on La Boheme, Leoncavallo's opera was received more favorably at the time but over the decades has been mostly erased by Puccini's version, now considered a masterwork.  (Leoncavallo wrote the frequently performed Pagliacci so he's still doing better in posterity than most people.)   

I became aware of Leoncavallo's La Boheme when I bought it by mistake and was confused that the aria names didn't match the Puccini libretto that I was looking at.  Womp womp.

Plot

Puccini's La Boheme retains the episodic nature of the novel and, given that nature, it's probably not that unexpected that there isn't a lot of plot. (Apparently the Leoncavallo version is far more focused on the love stories.)

The opera is in four acts.  The first opens with a group of artist friends burning their work to keep themselves warm in the cold winter.  They joke around and screw with their landlord.  Later the writer Rodolfo meets his neighbor Mimi whose candle has just burned out.  She asks him to light it for her and they fall in love at first sight.  In Act 2 Rodolfo and Mimi go with his friends to Cafe Momus where the painter Marcello reconnects with his on again off again lover Musetta.  Act 3 opens months later, with a coughing Mimi, sick with consumption (i.e. tuberculosis) seeking out Marcello to talk about how hard things have been with Rodolfo.  Rodolfo reveals that he's been acting out because he's scared that Mimi is dying.  The couple decides to stay together until spring.

Act 4, again set months later, echoes Act 1, beginning with the friends dicking around and Rodolfo and Marcello being sad that they are single again.  Musetta arrives with a dying Mimi.  The friends go to pawn their possessions to get medicine and Mimi and Rodolfo reaffirm their love for each other.  Everyone comes back with the medicine, but Mimi dies.  The end.

The Opera Orlando Production

Lillongs and Boulevards - The Setting

The Opera Orlando production was set in 1930's Shanghai, the "Paris of the East," a city carved up by foreign concessions and soon to be invaded by Japan as a prelude to World War II.  And not just any part of Shanghai, specifically the French Concession, land ceded to French sovereignty in one of the many unequal treaties that European powers forced on China after the Opium Wars.

In the pre-show talk, Stage Director and Scenic Designer Grant Preisser said of Shanghai:

1930s Shanghai was sort of equal parts very glamorous…but also very seedy and very poverty stricken in a lot of areas. ...  If you’ve ever been to Shanghai, if you’ve ever been In the French Concession it feels very different.  It feels very European, quite different than the rest of China. ...

In Shanghai they have the neighborhoods called lilong, which are alley houses and Shanghai in particular has an architectural style called shikumen lilong which is a really interesting blend of Chinese and European architecture.  And shikumen is “Stone Gate.” 

So you would look through these stone gates down these alleys, you would see these 3 story town houses that have anywhere between four to 15 people living their life and the alley would burst over with this sort of community.

In the show program book, Preisser writes of the reimagining:

I started building this concept while designing my last La Bohème in 2019. That production was set just after World War II in Paris, and it really leaned into the Bohemians having renewed hope and a sense of opportunity as Paris recovered and healed. In discussing the whys and wherefores of this update with the director, it dawned on me that Shanghai shared a lot of the same aspirations and hope prior to the Japanese occupation of the city in 1937, which led China into World War II. From that kernel of an idea has come this production, which celebrates the shared humanity in Puccini’s original story, while also putting a new lens and aesthetic on the opera.

The setting change lead to some really interesting framing, particularly in Act 2, set on the the boulevards of the French Concession and then the Cafe Momus.  As I said earlier, all the principle characters were Chinese, and all were played by Asian and Asian-American performers.  This production also had a very large ensemble, and basically all of them were not Chinese.  In the street scene the only Chinese characters were our Bohemian principles, the rickshaw drivers, and the poor peddlers hawking their wares.  The street scene had dozens and dozens of people walking across the stage in both directions, presumably turning around once offstage and walking back again, which gave it a realistic big city feel, where hundreds of pedestrians bustle by at any given moment.  But because the vast majority of them were Western and in Western clothes, it felt like it was set in Paris.  In the Cafe the only Chinese characters other than the mains were the waiters and the cafe's singer.

This had the effect of making the Bohemians seem out of place, giving them a sense of dislocation, and making them strangers in their own city.  The Cafe scene had a different, much sadder vibe than in a standard staging.  When the opera is set in Paris, there's a wealth and perhaps a class divide between the Bohemians and the Cafe patrons, but Paris is still their city.  For our Bohemians, though, their Shanghai is now a foreign land and most Chinese Shanghainese are allowed to exist in it only in service to their new overlords.  And in just a few short years, they will be under yet another foreign occupation during the Sino-Japanese War after The Battle of Shangai.

This is a very interesting almost subtextual addition to the story and gives, as Preisser said, a different lens to view the events through.  The poverty of the original's Bohemians isn't obviously a systemic failure of their society, or at least not necessarily a malicious one, but a story set in a Shanghai where it's residents have been, as the program notes put it, "ghettoized in their own city" there's a much stronger sense of victimhood and the poverty feels like dehumanization.  None of this is distracting at all and a viewer could happily sit back and enjoy the visual interest of the setting without getting wrapped up in this subtext, but I'm definitely glad it was there.

It speaks to the timeless genius of the opera that it can be added to without really even altering it that much, the way Shakespeare's plays have been restaged and reimagined over and over across the centuries and retain their core appeal while being able to effortless support new contexts the creator couldn't have possibly conceived of.

In the pre-show talk, Preisser shared that while the dates were altered for the setting, with Act 3 now being Chinese New Year 1934 and Act 4 taking place during the Mid-Autumn Festival,  the libretto really wasn't changed at all.

Performances

It hardly surprised me, but it shouldn't be left unsaid that the singing in this was really great.  There were no parts where I couldn't hear the singers over the orchestra and even the larger numbers that had multiple people singing were really legible.  And I think in the principles' voices all blended together and complemented each other really well.

The duet between Rodolfo (Yi Li) and Mimi (Bizhou Chang),"O soave fanciulla, o dolce viso" (i.e. "O lovely girl, o sweet face") was a big highlight for me.  So was Musetta's Waltz (sung by Ruoxi Bian) which is one of my favorite melodies and orchestrations in all of opera.  (I know that those are the two basic b*tch highlights but what can I say, I'm basic.)

Aside from the singing (and, again, that really should not be set aside) I thought the acting was very good.   The characters felt like they all knew and deeply cared for each other.  Some of that is the libretto, obviously, but hats off to the performers for selling the hell out of it.

In a show that has a lot of friends-dicking-around hijinks, the characters really looked like they were having fun and enjoying each other, which contributed to them feeling like a close knit group.  There was some good body language performances, too.  I was, for example, able to immediately tell Colline (Younggwang Park) from Schaunard (Donghoon Kang) when they entered just in how they carried themselves.

Just as they all seemed to be genuinely having fun in Act 1 and 2, they all looked genuinely upset in Act 4. This was especially striking after Mimi's death when we got to see each character have a private moment to react to the tragedy.  These are characters with very different personalities, and this was reflected in their different reactions.

I was genuinely emotionally affected by the end scene and I saw several people in the audience with tears in their eyes.  Pretty impressive for one of the most popular operas in the world, whose ending is not a secret, and that I'd wager a lot of the audience had seen more than once.

In the pre-show talk Conductor Allan Scott said this about watching an opera you already know the plot of:

“What I love about Puccini, and most operas in general, is that the characters don’t need a lot of explanation. … It’s very basic in terms of just the plot points. ... What happens, that’s important, but what’s really important is the stuff that’s in between.  How did they get there? 

I completely agree with this and I risk slipping into another rant against Spoiler Paranoia Culture, but I will resist.  ... For now.

Staging

There were a lot of nice blocking moments throughout.

Again, the scene where Mimi dies was a standout.  There was a lot of visual interest and dynamics in a scene where everyone could have been just standing about.  The actors were spread across the apartment set which meant you could look anywhere on stage and get some narrative information since as I mentioned above, the acting was quite good and each character was behaving realistically.  They also naturalistically moved around during the scene and wordlessly interacted without ever being distracting or leaving the blocking feeling unbalanced.

Other small moments I liked:

• Mimi pretending to search for the key she earlier dropped on purpose in a part of the apartment she hadn't even set foot in yet and the way she edged closer to Rodolfo while assuring him that she definitely, positively lives alone.

• Marcello (SeungHyeon Baek) miming the cello while Rodolfo waxed poetic about his love for Mimi.  Marcello's faux ecstatic facial expressions were quite amusing.

• Schaunard keeping vigil in Act 4.  He left the apartment to give Mimi and Rodolfo some alone time but stayed on stage at the bottom of the small stairway leading down from the elevated apartment set, which the show had established was "outside."  The libretto as written just has Schaunard leave the stage, but it was a great touch to have him still visible, reinforcing that the characters love each other and are looking out for each other.  He wasn't just wandering around or passing the time, he was standing watch and the way he bolted upright and ran back inside after Rodolfo cries "Good God, Mimi!" was honestly a pretty powerful moment.  (This isn't blocking related, but I also like how when he leaves the apartment a poignant version of his jaunty theme plays but it somehow feels mournful.  The notes of the melody were the same, it was just the changes to the orchestration and tempo that made the difference.)

Opera Thoughts Regarding the Source Material

The Music

Opera scholar Mel Cooper, in the video "An Introduction to Puccini's La Boheme," says "Musically [La Boheme is] one of the wonders of western culture”  After having seen it twice now, I can't say I particularly disagree.

In the beginning...

Fifteen seconds into the opera there are already some interesting things going on in the music.  First, there's no overture.  It just starts by launching into the Bohemian theme and then Marcello and Rodolfo start singing.  The Bohemian theme is a fun, light hearted scampering melody over some horn blasts that I would almost describe as "exuberant."

It's an interesting way to start a tragic opera, but there actually is something unsettling buried in the theme that took me a while to figure out.  The music is sketching out a tritone or an augmented 4th (a B natural over an F in this case) which, to the Western ear anyway, is a dislocating dissonance that really wants to resolve to something, but it doesn't here.  For a tritone its pretty subtle but it's a nice touch that it's tucked way in such a chipper bit of music, like it's harmonic foreshadowing of the tragedy that's to come.

This opening was not written specifically for this opera and is from one of Puccini's symphonic works that he repurposed.  Cooper describes La Boheme as a "symphonic opera" with each of the four acts functioning like the movements in a symphony: Act 1 is the opener that introduces the musical themes, Act 2 is the fun Scherzo (structured ABA with a triple meter), Act 3 is the slow Adagio and Act 4 is the recapitulation of the opening, which restates the themes of Act I and serves as the final culmination of everything that came before.

Leitmotifs and Naturalism

Cooper describes La Boheme as musically "very modernistic because its picking up on Wagnerian ideas about using motifs."  Leitmotifs (i.e. recurring melodies that represent a character or an idea) are all over this opera.  So there's a theme for the Bohemians, Mimi has a theme, Mimi and Rodolfo have a love theme, there's a theme representing Mimi' sickness etc etc.

Dr. Lilly Kass, Opera Philadelphia Scholar in Residence, in "Opera Breakdown: La Boheme," describes how Puccini was highly involved in the libretto, making Illica and Giacosa rewrite large sections which

allowed Puccini to demonstrate his skill in writing more realistic, chatty lines of music for his characters which was a more modern approach while at the same time in other moments drawing on the long, sweeping, vocally impressive, and memorable musical lines for which more traditional Italian opera was known.

Cooper also references this "chattiness:"

its also picking up on the idea that the music as such should follow the words that are being sung so that its in slightly more conversational style. There aren’t abrupt shifts between the aria and the telling of the story in between each aria. It flows in a much more natural way.  But that said, Puccini had a fantastic melodic gift and even when they’re having conversational kind of duets and things theres a lot of memorable tunefulness going on.

Nostalgia and Simultaneity

The prevalence of leitmotifs makes the friends' nostalgia for better times at the end of the opera really land.  As they reminisce, motifs from earlier keep popping up.  Music already has such a powerful ability to make us feel our past experience; we all have songs that remind us of a particular time or a particular person or a particular version of ourselves.  Pairing this power with actual specific motifs both sells the characters' nostalgia but also feels true for the audience because it feels like what it feels like to remember.

Opera, and any kind of musical theater, really, has a unique tool at its disposal.  To quote the Metropolitan Opera educators's guide "What to Expect from La Boheme",

One of the most interesting and theatrically exciting aspects of opera is the possibility of having several characters express different thoughts at the same time in simultaneous lines of melody and harmony. In the hands of the right composer, this can be an amazing tool to manage the audience’s attention, to create a musical moment or scene that has greater impact than the sum of individual performers singing individual parts.

The Act II quartet, or double duet, with Mimi, Rodolfo, Musetta, and Marcello all singing is extremely parsable in a way it wouldn't be in any other medium.  A movie with four characters simultaneously talking would be incomprehensible; a novel with four characters talking would be comprehensible but unable to convey simultaneous conversation (and the reader wouldn't be able to parse it if it could).

I also find that in opera, shorthand that would annoy me in a book or a film works much better.  Watching two characters fall in love after a 3 minute interaction always feels unconvincing to me in a film or a book, but on stage with the melodies and orchestrations able to convey emotion, subtext, and internal weather, it feels more verisimilitudinous despite being even more literally unrealistic.  The simple act of having two characters start singing separately and then converge on the same melody or start harmonizing together really simply and powerfully shows  they are intertwining with each other, rather than most shorthand which just tells us they are.  The heightened unreality almost makes the actual interaction seem non-diegetic and representative, rather than literally happening as we see it.

The Drama

The Libretto

The first thing that should be said about the libretto is that it's really readable on its own in a way that not all operas are, even great ones.  There's some great poetic, but not overblown sentiments and some pretty memorable lines.

For example, when Mimi first meets Rodolfo, she talks about her loneliness and poverty, but then talks about a small thing she does have.  She likes to go up to the apartment roof because:

When spring comes the sun's first rays are mine.

April's first kiss is mine!

There's some good characterization for everyone.  Marcello, recently burned by love, says of Rodolfo and Mimi's mooning over each other:

O, sweet age of false utopias!

You hope and believe, and all seems beautiful.

Schaunard is a flamboyant personality, Colline the philosopher is more laconic but his efficient witticisms make one wonder whether he's pretentious or in on the joke.  His line about the food at Cafe Momus is pretty characteristic:  "This chicken is a poem!"

And speaking of jokes there are some legitimately funny ones in this show.

Schaunard's introduction in Act 1 is lunacy, as the newly rolling-in-cash musician relates how a rich man hired him for lessons but actually wanted to kill his neighbor's annoying parrot:

SCHAUNARD

When do the lessons begin?

I introduce myself, he hires me,

I ask: When do the lessons begin?

He replies: "Let's start, look!" and points to a parrot on the first floor.

Then adds: "You play until that bird dies!"

And then in Act 4 when the friends are envisioning that the crusty bread they have is delectable rich man's food, the parrot comes up again:

RODOLFO

Which do you choose, Baron, salmon or trout?

MARCELLO

Well, Duke, how about some parrot-tongue?

SCHAUNARD

Thanks, but it's fattening.  I must dance this evening.

That's great, it's genuinely funny.  (And, of course as I said above, the performers absolutely sold it.)

The non-hijinks moments also land, and there's good relational details in the libretto.  I particularly like Mimi's very small line to the her friends in Act 4:

Hello, Marcello, Schaunard, Colline...All of you are here, smiling at Mimì.

It might have been tempting to write her as singularly fixed on Rodolfo, but she's happy to see all of her friends, as befitting someone who has spent a lot of time with all of these people.  I'm glad the librettists didn't skip past how a group of friends would act in this situation just to get to a love song.

Mimi and Flowers

Mimi probably gets the least characterization out of everyone, but the recurrence of flower imagery around her gives her some metaphorical heft.  She makes a living sewing silk flowers to sell, and Rodolfo describes her as a "hothouse flower, blighted by poverty."

In her first meeting with Rodolfo she compares wonderful living flowers to her silk ones:

A rose blossoms in my vase,

I breathe its perfume, petal by petal.

So sweet is the flower's perfume.

But the flowers I make, alas, have no scent.

This comparison of living to non-living flowers by a woman who is dying in poverty is a poignant one.  This associates her existence with something lacking the scent of life.

But then Rodolfo describes their love this way in Act 2:

As songs flow from my brain,

The flowers bloom in her hands,

And in joyful spirits love blossoms also.

At the beginning Mimi associated herself with something that's only a facsimile of the living, but in love she's a source of life.

I like her line to Rodolfo when they are about to try to separate at the end of Act 3.  She says:

I'm going back alone to my lonely nest to make false flowers.

Not "imitation flowers" but "false flowers."  She chooses he bitterest word she could have to describe the life she's going back to, as if the bloom of their love was just another illusion.

Also, I think it's interesting that several of the hawkers they pass on the street are selling flowers and Parpignol the toymaker's cart is specifically described as "all decked in flowers."  This brings up several subtle and potentially interesting questions depending on if those flowers are understood to be real flowers or are like Mimi's imitations.  I'm not quite sure what I think of this, but it's something to chew on.

An Ensemble Piece

While of course, the central emotional drama in La Boheme is the love between Rodolfo and Mimi, and the secondary one is the tempestuous relationship of Marcello and Musetta, the opera is more of an ensemble than a boiled down plot summary would imply.  Colline and Schaunard get a good bit of stage time and a lot of it is fun and memorable.  Because of how closely the opera hews to the original novel, it inherits its life and times feel as it follows a group of friends and checks in with them over the span of several months.  The drama with Mimi is of course important and the most painful, but it is one drama of many the characters are walking through.

Conductor Scott emphasized this point in the pre-show talk:

[When] someone’s going through tragedy, the rest of the world is still dysfunctioning … The rest of the world outside of these Bohemians is still going on.  And I think that’s where Puccini hits it right on the head…and that’s why I love this opera.

Given Puccini's close association with verismo opera, it's not surprising that the realism of Scènes de la vie de bohème would inspire him to stick closely to it.  Leoncavallo's version focuses on the tragedy of the lovers and has a more traditional operatic tragic arc, where Puccini's has joy and hijinks alongside the tragedy, like real life does.

Nick Reveles speculates that the episodic realism of Puccini's opera contributed to La Boheme's lukewarm initial reception.

A Tragedy of Circumstance

Something I find interesting about this story is that the tragedy of Mimi is not a character driven tragedy.  No one failed her; the drama isn't because of something she did or some misunderstanding or ill-intent. It's just bad luck.  She already has tuberculosis before the opera even starts.  This helps the story feel realistic and fits with Puccini's fascination with verismo.

At the end, there's no huge song of love for Mimi or any long poetic arias about the grief of the characters after she's gone.  There's no equivalent to Werther, who shoots himself and then gets to sing a passionate duet with Lotte as he bleeds out.  Mimi's brief candle just flickers and is gone; the others don't even notice right away.  For me the near anticlimax of this made it more powerful, more emotional, because it felt like how it feels to lose someone.

People get sick and die.  Why?  Not because it's a culmination of their character arcs, but  because they just do.  It sucks.  There doesn't have to be an Iago engineering their downfall.   Even the Mimi's poverty doesn't really have much to do with her death.*

And Rodolfo can only muster a "Mimi!" before the curtain drops.  Words and poetry can't capture the sudden devastation or describe the empty spot where Mimi once was.  For Mimi, the opera is a window on the fleetness of time and how life can be fulfilling and full of love even when the clock is ticking.

* One possible reservation I have about this statement.  In Dr. Kass's talk for Opera Philadelphia, she mentions that at the time of the novel people thought consumption was caused by the cold.  (Tuberculosis was not proven to be infectious until more than a decade after the novel came out.)  From the novel's perspective, then, the case could be made that her poverty is indirectly responsible for her death.  The opera really doesn't frame it that way and I haven't read the novel, so I don't know if that connection is drawn.

Also: Murger not knowing tuberculosis was contagious explains a few things, with regards to how the rest of the principle cast, especially Rodolfo, doesn't end up with it too.  (Not that that matters, really.  If you're nit-picking plot holes in an opera, you're a weirdo.)

A Missing Act

When librettist Luigi Illica's papers were given to the Parma museum in 1957 a full libretto of La Boheme was discovered.  In it was a missing Act between the extant Act 2 and Act 3 that Puccini decided to cut. The scene takes place at a party at Musetta's apartment where she gives Mimi a nice dress and introduces her to a nobleman.  Mimi and this Viscount dance, making Rodolfo jealous.  I don't have a larger point here, I just thought it was an interesting tidbit, both that it exists and that Puccini saw it and said "nah, screw that."

Gallimaufry

• King Edward VII said it was his favorite opera because it's short.  (It's under 2 hours.)  Philistine.

• Dr. Kass's video talked about how Opera Philadelphia's 2023 production, directed by Yuval Sharon, unfolded in reverse order, from Act 4 to Act 1, with the addition of a character called the Wanderer watching the proceedings.  A really neat idea, I would loved to have seen it.

• I first heard Musetta’s waltz when I played it for my piano lessons years before I saw La Boheme the first time.  Former Opera Orlando Studio Artist Kristen Marie Gillis sang it at a Valentine's day house concert this year and it was phenomenal.  (She rules, would love to see her perform again.)

• I love that Musetta sells her earrings to help Mimi with no hesitation.

• I am aware that I put the definition of "bohemian" up top but didn't mention the "Làzhú" of the essay title until now.  It means "candle" in Mandarin.  (Hat tip to June for enabling my  pretensions of cleverness.)

• "I hate when lovers act like husbands"  Another banger, Musetta.

• If you're this deep into a review and analysis of La Boheme you probably already know that one of its derivative works is the show Rent.  I saw Rent live once and also watched the 2005 film.  I hate it.  I think I hate it more now that I've seen La Boheme twice.  Lindsay Ellis has a fantastic analysis of the film (and the show in general) called "Rent - Look Pretty and Do as Little as Possible" and it really helped me articulate some of the reasons I didn't like it and gave me a whole bunch of new ones!  The most petty reason I hate Rent is that when Roger cures Mimi's AIDS by singing a song to her or whatever the triumphant musical sting is an electric guitar version of... Musetta's Waltz.  ???  Mimi is not the Musetta analog in Rent.  They couldn't have used Rodolfo and Mimi's just-as-iconic love aria?   Philistines, I tell you.

• Rodolfo being worried that his poverty and the resulting freezing apartment is hastening Mimi's death softens him a bit.  Especially given how their relationship is all between the Acts, he does come off as kind of a jealous dick.  Even if his jealousy is a pretense to drive her away because he's scared he's killing her, I'm not sure how yelling at her is a good move.

• In 2023 I read a really great novel called The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi.  It is the story of former beauty pageant contestant Wang Qiyao's life in Shanghai over four decades, starting in the 1940s.  It was a poignant and beautiful book and Shanghai is almost a character in itself.  It's part of the reason I was excited to see this production.  Check it out.

• Orange County Mayor Demmings spoke before the Opera started, presenting a proclamation that October 5 would be Opera Orlando Day.  When handed the mic, he said "I always wanted to sing on stage... But today is not the day"  The crowd chuckled, but I wanted to be able to say I heard the Mayor sing at Steinmetz hall.

• 2025's Mid-Autumn Festival was on October 6, the day after the performance I attended.  I don't know if that was coincidence or if Grant was watching the calendar closely.

• Rodolfo saying "I still have hope" when Mimi is already dead is heartbreaking.

• The "Lilong" alley houses that Grant mentioned are also known as "Longtang."  I only bring it up because in the outline I wrote before seeing the show I had the placeholder heading "Longtangs and Boulevards" and I almost forgot to change it to the word Grant helpfully defined better than I could in the pre-show talk.   (It's "longtang" in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, which is the only reason I know the word.)

• I'm glad Ruoxi Bian is an Opera Orlando Studio Artist this season.  Looking forward to hearing her her sing again.  I think the point is obviously that all Studio Artists should be forced to sing Musetta's Waltz.

Conclusion

Opera Orlando's La Boheme 2025 was an amazing experience and it scratched all the itches.  The music and performances were beautiful, the emotionality genuinely affecting, and it was intellectually interesting.  I give it 6.3 mandolins.  (Remember that 6.7 is the highest score on the mandolin scale.)

Here's to another 10 years of Opera Orlando.

"And I'll see you at the opera"

-m