Scottish Opera Puccini La bohème Festival Theatre Edinburgh 14th November 2025 Review
Scottish Opera, Puccini La bohème is at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh until Saturday 22 Nov, and this co-production with Theater St Gallen, a revival of Barbe & Doucet’s 2017 production, was obviously as big a crowd-pleaser tonight as it was first time around.
In this re-working of the La bohème story, two time shifts have been made. No longer are we in the Bohemian Paris of the late 1800s, but the jazz years of the 1920s. This time period is as imagined by a tourist who is walking around a contemporary flea market and finding a stall that specialises in 1920objets d’art. Soon she is imagining the poet, painter, singer and philosopher of Puccinni’s La bohème and in her ‘ eye becomes the seamstress, Mimi. This move cleverly wraps the past and present together in one package, but unless you have read the programme notes, that contemporary Paris full of tourists and people on smart-phones at the beginning of the story and after the interval, can be a bit of a culture shock leading to the obvious question –“why are we here, in the present day?”
Thankfully a more familiar, and somehow more comforting world starts to unfold as Rodolfo - poet (Mario Chang), Marcello – painter (Roland Wood), Colline – philosopher (Callum Thorpe), and Schaunard - singer (Edward Jowle) draw the audience into their life of worldly goods poor, but intellectually rich bohemians. Very soon, Mimi (Hye-Youn Lee) and love interest/singer Musetta (Rhian Lois) complete the central characters of this story.
Visually, Barbe & Doucet (stage direction, sets, and costumes) set this 1920s Parisian world with great care and with more than a few homages to earlier times. Here, Schaunard looks like he has stepped right out of Henri Toulouse Lautrec’s famous Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant poster, complete with his black jacket and red scarf. Creating so much of the visual atmosphere of this production is creative and often subtle work by Lighting Designer Guy Simard. It is sometimes all too easy to forget that, unlike many other design aspects for theatre, a lighting designer has to work with what is available in any venue.
A good story is, they say, able to survive many interpretations, and Puccini certainly knew this when he adapted this work from the original book, but the importance of his music cannot be over-estimated here as adding many moments of emotional highs and lows in what is at its heart a very dark story of people struggling to survive in a very harsh world. A lot of the humour in La bohème is the dark humour of people finding laughter to stop them from at times crying.
La bohème is a perfect example of realistic, dramatic opera, but it is in the end all about the music, performed tonight by The Orchestra of Scottish Opera, and it is Puccini’s music that not only makes this a story of ultimately doomed love whilst also, somehow, making some of the harsher personality traits of some of the bohemian men more acceptable, even likeable.
Performance wise, there were no weak links here from anyone and Hye-Youn Lee deserved all of the applause this evening for her role as Mimi. If you like melodrama, heaped upon melodrama, wrapped up in wonderful music and some of opera’s most iconic arias, then this is a production not to miss.
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
In this re-working of the La bohème story, two time shifts have been made. No longer are we in the Bohemian Paris of the late 1800s, but the jazz years of the 1920s. This time period is as imagined by a tourist who is walking around a contemporary flea market and finding a stall that specialises in 1920objets d’art. Soon she is imagining the poet, painter, singer and philosopher of Puccinni’s La bohème and in her ‘ eye becomes the seamstress, Mimi. This move cleverly wraps the past and present together in one package, but unless you have read the programme notes, that contemporary Paris full of tourists and people on smart-phones at the beginning of the story and after the interval, can be a bit of a culture shock leading to the obvious question –“why are we here, in the present day?”
Thankfully a more familiar, and somehow more comforting world starts to unfold as Rodolfo - poet (Mario Chang), Marcello – painter (Roland Wood), Colline – philosopher (Callum Thorpe), and Schaunard - singer (Edward Jowle) draw the audience into their life of worldly goods poor, but intellectually rich bohemians. Very soon, Mimi (Hye-Youn Lee) and love interest/singer Musetta (Rhian Lois) complete the central characters of this story.
Visually, Barbe & Doucet (stage direction, sets, and costumes) set this 1920s Parisian world with great care and with more than a few homages to earlier times. Here, Schaunard looks like he has stepped right out of Henri Toulouse Lautrec’s famous Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant poster, complete with his black jacket and red scarf. Creating so much of the visual atmosphere of this production is creative and often subtle work by Lighting Designer Guy Simard. It is sometimes all too easy to forget that, unlike many other design aspects for theatre, a lighting designer has to work with what is available in any venue.
A good story is, they say, able to survive many interpretations, and Puccini certainly knew this when he adapted this work from the original book, but the importance of his music cannot be over-estimated here as adding many moments of emotional highs and lows in what is at its heart a very dark story of people struggling to survive in a very harsh world. A lot of the humour in La bohème is the dark humour of people finding laughter to stop them from at times crying.
La bohème is a perfect example of realistic, dramatic opera, but it is in the end all about the music, performed tonight by The Orchestra of Scottish Opera, and it is Puccini’s music that not only makes this a story of ultimately doomed love whilst also, somehow, making some of the harsher personality traits of some of the bohemian men more acceptable, even likeable.
Performance wise, there were no weak links here from anyone and Hye-Youn Lee deserved all of the applause this evening for her role as Mimi. If you like melodrama, heaped upon melodrama, wrapped up in wonderful music and some of opera’s most iconic arias, then this is a production not to miss.
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com