San Francisco Classical Voice

The Mimi, Elena Prokina, has all the warmth and compassion this Rodolfo merits, portraying the innocent who is nonetheless equally bent on romance. Prokina's voice, however, betrayed her, not simply because its fullness and rich timbre suggest a more mature character than Mimi, the live-alone little seamstress. Something that sounds like a flaw in her technique caused her to sing consistently below pitch, centered just below the middle of each note in the line.

Runnicles conducted an intense account of the score, a pressure that heightened the charge of the music and perhaps the passion, but may have had something to do with ensemble problems in the orchestra in Act I. Matters tightened up thereafter, and the orchestral colors were bright, the sound very good. Runnicles and the singers kept good contact while maintaining the flux of tempo so special in Puccini.

Marcello is the most interesting of the Bohemian crew, the most colorful and wide ranging in temperament, and Scott Hendricks portrayed that fairly well. The horse play and bravado are easy, of course, but the sensibility, the compassion and identification with the troubled couple are not, and that was nice. Hendricks has a fine, well-produced baritone that carries well in the Opera House, his debut in it in fact.

Anna Netrebko, being heavily promoted these days, was the Musetta, attention focused on her both behind the scenes and from a large video camera in Box A in preparation for a segment on her in a forthcoming "Sixty Minutes." And was she ever aware of that! It's hard to recall more of a ball of fire Musetta than she, tearing up the scenery in the Café Momus Act, over the top altogether, and all but karate-kicking Marcello during their row in the City Gate scene. The role's limited singing chance, just Musetta's Waltz, brought out her clear, accurate and sparkling high but the middle range sounding roughened, not distinctive or pliant.

The other contributions were appreciable. Friedemann Röhlig was a strong and individual Colline, a tall, thin chap with a personality, a deep enough voice that has presence and carries. Brad Alexander, a former Adler Fellow who has been praised in reviews of appearances in recital and Opera Center productions here, was a good and supportive Schaunard, but his baritone didn't match the three other men's voices in volume, didn't carry well in the house. The veteran character bass baritone Peter Strummer did two excellent turns, double cast as the landlord Benoit and Musetta's rich goat of an escort, Alcindoro.

Lotfi Mansouri should be credited for originating this striking production, which he did for that successful run in the Orpheum. The production was mounted there by Mark Lamos and designed by Michael Yeargan. It works perhaps even more effectively on the Opera House stage, in the way the garret "explodes," first the walls peeling away so that the little room appears to be floating against the Parisian skyline. Then, as the large painted scenes of the Latin Quarter arrive, and the set for the Café Momus, tradition is turned on its head. Instead of the scene being the Café exterior, the action taking place around and in front of outside tables facing the Place de la Whatever, we are inside the Belle Époque interior of the Café. Consequently, all the street scene brouhaha, with the toyseller and other vendors, the crowds, the marching band must take place upstage behind the "exterior" windows and walls of the Café. But since most of that cannot be kept out of the audience's view, the stage director, Sandra Bernhard has to have much of it spill periodically into the Café. Trés compliqué.

As Bernhard deals with and exploits that set-up, she blows the action up into a slapstick probably crazier than any of the company's 43 previous Café Momus scenes. The audience laughs and then the opera continues into the serious "City gate" scene, apparently none the worse for the extreme degree of the nuthouse antics. Clever would have been to depict Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec characters with more suave high jinks. Otherwise, Bernhard's direction was intelligent, her management of the City Gate and final garret scene according to the book, and touching. This La Bohème did what we came for.