Kwon creates a precious beauty
The Paris of Simon Phillips's production of Puccini's La Boheme is not the sort of Paris you imagine; though, with its cheap accommodation, bad wiring and grimy car parks, it is possibly the one you will get, at least on a modern budget.
His bohemians are generation Y males, who use laptops, do drugs and leave the toilet seat up and, although some of the transposition of 19th-century deprivations to contemporary ones are contrived (burning a print-out of your latest play for warmth doesn't have quite the devil-may-care abandon of burning a handwritten text), the attempt is generally amusing.
However, this is not really the point. As the writer Carl Dahlhaus pointed out, Paris is as much the heroine of Boheme as Mimi. You have to love them both. You have to feel that in the intoxication of the Cafe Momus, that, for a brief moment, the problems of the world and the problems of your love life are inextricably fused and equally solvable. Loving is easy to do in the case of Hye Seoung Kwon's Mimi, who is becoming Opera Australia's patron saint of dying waifs.
But Phillips and the designer, Stephen Curtis, have replaced Paris with an anonymous modern city space overtaken by what Milan Kundera has called the Age of Total Ugliness.
Kwon's voice is still on the small side for this role, but the purity of sound and vowel creates a precious beauty, which sat very well with her fragile characterisation, and she was able to rise to great strength in Act III. In fact it was Acts III and IV that redeemed this performance after a first half that lacked both dramatic and musical passion (despite the efforts of a splendid breakdancer just before the curtain).
As Rodolfo, Aldo Di Toro didn't quite sustain the long lines of the great duet at the end of Act I, with a slight tendency to let the tension out of the voice between phrases, despite an undeniably attractive lightness in all parts of his range.
But in the last two acts, things became both musically and dramatically galvanised and Phillips should be congratulated for finding a way of setting Puccini's difficult final close plausibly without losing impact.
The gen Y males, though uncouth, are splendid, Jose Carbo powerful and suave as Marcello, Jud Arthur, as the dreadlocked drug-dealing philosopher Colline, soberly renunciatory in the Act IV coat song, and Warwick Fyfe intense as the burning-eyed musician Schaunard. Amelia Farrugia's Musetta was vocally bright and involving in the second and final acts, although cluttered direction deprived her vocally fine Quando M'en Vo Soletta in Act II of seductiveness, pushing it towards meretricious parody, to which John Bolton Wood (Benoit and Alcindoro) was a willing fall guy.
The conductor, Giovanni Reggioli, allowed musical lines to float with an instinctive ear for dramatic pace and the result from the orchestra was well-shaped and rewarding despite occasional weaknesses, particularly in the woodwind.
