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It was not a big hit at first. After the New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1900, the Tribune critic called it "foul in subject" and "silly and inconsequential." But audiences have embraced the timeless quality of this simple story of artists starving in a garret and giving it all up for love. Themes like getting a job, being in love and dealing with loss are issues audiences always respond to. If these circumstances are wrapped around the lives of writers, poets and girls no better than they ought to be—well, it beats watching a play about accountants.
Also, there is all that glorious Puccini music. And you know it, even if you don't think so. It's the major background music in Moonstruck, it showed up in Season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (when Giles' girlfriend got snuffed), and Robin Williams uses it in an attempt to get a rise out of catatonic patients in Awakenings. This week, Las Vegas audiences will be able to see UNLV Opera Theatre present La Bohême. Graduate and undergraduate students will appear in the production, UNLV students and community members will appear in the chorus, and members of the University Children's chorus also will perform. Worth a look.
The plot is simple—boy meets girl, boy gets girl, girl dies. The story revolves around pairs of ill-fated lovers, Rodolfo and Mimi and Marcello and Musette. Added to this are two other guys, the philosopher Colline and a musician, Schaunard. Think Friends without cheap central heating or steady meals.
It opens in an attic apartment in 1830s Paris. The four buddies are whinging about the cold and being hungry. Somehow one of them has come up with some cash, so all but Rodolfo go off to a restaurant where they run into Musette, Marcello's former girlfriend. After his friends go, Rodolfo's neighbor Mimi shows up to ask if she could get a light for her candle, probably figuring that any excuse to meet a cute guy in the building is a good excuse. They sing a lot of famous stuff, they fall in love, she coughs (definite plot point), and then they leave to join his friends.
Mimi and Rodolfo become an item, and Musette and Marcello get back together. Over time, the couples fight, and Marcello and Musette break up again. Mimi and Rodolfo, though, make up and decide to hang together even though she is dying of tuberculosis. All her friends hang with her and try to make her better. Chances aren't good, as antibiotics haven't been invented yet. There is a lot more singing, even by Mimi, whose lung disease doesn't seem to prevent her from singing. She and Rodolfo pretend she isn't dying; she does anyway. He yells, "Mimi, Mimi," and the curtain falls.