Opera San José's six-performance run of Puccini's evergreen La Bohème opened this past Saturday at the California Theatre in, of course, San José. It's the kind of opera that's so spectacularly well-written and so theatrical that, if well-directed, you'll come out of it weeping, and, well, I certainly teared up regularly during the performance.
Opera San José owns this production and has staged it before. It moves the action from the 1850s into the 1920s, but I can't say that this was very obvious, except in the French soldiers' uniforms in the second act. There are no telephones, biplanes, or automobiles to tip you off, no walking wounded from the recently-concluded Great War. The women's fashions aren't flapper-era, either. I don't see any gains from this temporal relocation, but neither did it do any harm.
More importantly, Michelle Cuizon's direction was suitably lively; funny or serious when required and always snappy. I particularly liked the end of act 2, where you get comedy and tragedy on stage at the same time, with Marcello and Musetta having it out on the left for probably the 20th time, while on the right Mimì and Rodolfo are weeping quietly together. Kim A. Tolman's realistic sets of a Parisian garret, Café Momus, and the Barrière d'Enfer look good and work well.
This run has two sopranos as Mimì, Kearstin Piper Brown, whom I saw on Saturday, and Mikayla Sager, whose work I know from when she was an Adler Fellow. I feel you can't go wrong with either of them! I'd seen and loved Brown last year in Opera Parallèle's The Shining; she has a beautiful voice with great control and lots of spin, making her an ideal Mimì. Sager has a darker, equally beautiful voice and, like Brown, is a wonderful artist. She was fabulous a couple of years ago in Desdemona's long scene at the end of Verdi's Otello. So, as I said, you can't go wrong withe either soprano.
Also really wonderful in this production is Kodon Choi as Marcello, Rodolfo the poet's painter sidekick, the on-and-off lover of Musetta. Choi has a gorgeous dark voice that sounds built for the big Verdi baritone roles. I wouldn't be surprised to see him as Rigoletto or Renato or one of those guys in his future appearances. WooYoung Yoon is an appealing Rodolfo, with a reedy voice and a tendency to go sharp when his voice is under pressure.
And there we get to a solvable problem in the production: the California Theatre is very small, seating around 1120 people, and Joseph Marcheso, Opera San José's music director, is conducting enthusiastically and, at times, rather too loudly. This affects Yoon a lot, when he's trying to make himself heard, and it's particularly a problem for the show's Musetta, Melissa Sondhi. She was a good Barbarina in the fabulous Marriage of Figaro a couple of seasons back, and she's a fine actress, but she has an unusually small voice for Musetta, and she's getting drowned out too often. My plus-one for the evening, a horn player who knows the score well, detected orchestral balance issues, too.
The rest of the cast is perfectly lovely and together they make a great ensemble cast: Jesús Vincente Murillo's Schaunard, Younggwang Park's Colline, and Philip Skinner's Benoit and Alcindoro are all good.
Four performances remain, on November 22 at 7:30 p.m., November 24 and 30 at 2:00 p.m., and December 1 at 2:00 p.m.
