La Bohème

• Conductor:
  Dane Lam*
• Director:
  Kyle Lang*
• Rodolfo:
  Yi Li
• Mimi:
  Emily Michiko Jensen*
• Marcello:
  SeungHyeon Baek*
• Musetta:
  Nayoung Ban*
• Schaunard:
  Sejin Park*
• Colline:
  Robert Ellsworth Feng
• Benoit:
  Chung-Wai Soong
• Alcindoro:
  Chung-Wai Soong
• Parpignol
  Taka Komagata
• 
  *HOT debuts

Passionate and timeless

An audience favorite for over a century, this tale of four young Parisians who dedicate their lives to art and love is guaranteed to touch your heart. Puccini’s lush, romantic score perfectly captures the simple joys and heartbreaking sorrows of the idealistic young. Their camaraderie, conviction, and passions, masterfully conveyed by an iconic score, make La Bohème easy to love—and impossible to forget.

HOT’s production features an all-Asian principal cast that celebrates the diversity of talent the opera world has to offer. 

 

FEATURING:

Rodolfo Yi Li Mimi Emily Michiko Jensen* Marcello SeungHyeon Baek* Musetta Nayoung Ban*

 

What’s the Music Like?

Act I features three showstoppers back to back – Rodolfo’s famous aria ‘Che gelida manina’ (Your tiny hand is frozen) – in which he introduces himself – followed by Mimì’s ‘Mi chiamano Mimì’ (They call me Mimì), and then their soaring love duet ‘O soave fanciulla’ (O lovely girl in the moonlight), which culminates in a beautiful floated high C for the soprano.

Puccini’s score is also full of scene painting, evoking wintriness, the atmosphere of a busy Parisian café, or the boisterous energy of the bohemians as they work. Listen out for the opening of Act III, where flutes and harp perfectly conjure up the effect of snowflakes falling.

Each character has their own ‘leitmotif’ (a signature tune), which often announces their arrival, even if it’s just in the orchestra underneath. You’ll hear them again and again – and start to recognize the themes.

La Bohème… the inspiration for RENT?
(Warning: Contains Spoilers!)

La Bohème was written in 1896, and, a century later, its themes inspired Jonathan Larson’s 1996 Broadway musical Rent.

The story of Rent began with playwright Billy Aronson, who moved to Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in 1983. Homelessness was a huge issue in the city at that time, as was the emergence of AIDS, which would affect 1,096 new victims by year’s end. One night, Aronson caught a performance of La Bohème. The opera, written by the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, is a four-act masterpiece about a group of penniless, starving artists in 19th-century Paris. The four main characters share a crowded living space which sometimes gets so cold that they must burn their own works for warmth. To make matters worse, their city has fallen prey to a raging tuberculosis epidemic. Still, in their strife, the artists find camaraderie.

“I remember walking home … and noticing the contrast between the luscious world of the opera and the world I lived in,” Aronson told Mediander. Soon, he hatched the idea of adapting La Bohème into a musical that would be set in New York during the AIDS crisis. Many plot points in Rent mirror La Bohème, including the relationship between Mimi and Roger (in Puccini’s opera, much of the drama stems from Rodolfo, a poet, and his rocky affair with a poor woman named Mimi, who *spoiler alert* ultimately dies of tuberculosis) and Angel’s decision to kill an obnoxious dog for money (in La Bohème, one character earns some badly-needed cash by doing away with a pesky parrot).

“I love working with musicals and dance, but I don’t write music,” Aronson said. To enlist some help with his La Bohème project, the writer approached some acquaintances at the theater Playwrights Horizons, who put him in touch with composer (and part-time restaurant waiter) Jonathan Larson. 

And there you have it, Rent, the musical sensation, was born… and based on La Bohème!

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