Director’s Note

This telling of La bohème was born out of the strict Covid regulation during the 2020 season at San Diego Opera, in which none of the singers could get within fifteen feet of one another without a mask. This meant I had to figure out how to tell this story of friendship, love and mortality without physical touch. The concept of setting the piece in Rodolfo’s memory grew from there. Henri Murger wrote “Scènes de la vie de Bohème” in 1845 as a series of short tales that would later be adapted by Giacosa and Illica into the libretto for La bohème. In the book, Murger cast himself as the protagonist, a writer by the name of Rodolphe, and so I’ve set our production of La bohème in Rodolfo’s (Murger’s alter ego’s) study approximately fifteen years after the opera has ended. As he writes these tales of his misspent youth, he is surrounded by his memories of the garret, Marcello’s feverish affair with Musetta, café Momus, and his beloved Mimì. Sometimes they flit by him with histrionic joy, sometimes he finds himself falling deep inside of them, and in the case of Mimì, she weighs on him so heavily that she actually becomes manifest in his study. Her ghost is still with him, as the dead usually are when they are taken from us so suddenly.

This unusual lens allows us to probe deeper into Rodolfo’s emotional space as he wrestles with the exuberance of carefree youth running headlong into the deep pain and guilt of true love and untimely death. In the years following 2020, I’ve teased out this concept further in three more productions while, once again, being able to be close to one another on stage. I believe that telling the story this way gives us a deeper connection to these brilliant, well-rounded characters as they struggle with the universal, timeless pains of being human.