The opera (#69)

Last weekend my parents treated me to a production of La Boheme. It might not have been the Met, or the Lyric Opera which my parents gush about from their days Chicago (we were in Boise, after all), but I can say with full conviction that it was one of my most favorite musical experiences of the last three decades.

We got to watch the whole tragedy unfold at the Egyptian, a refurbished art deco movie theater in downtown Boise.

The space was small and intimate. I could see the singers' faces without the aid of opera glasses (much as I love those). So clearly, in fact, that I had a hard time convincing myself that Rodolfo was not Bobby Moynihan from SNL.

I followed the translation projected above the stage, but sometimes I just had to trust I knew what was going on because I couldn't take my eyes off the action on stage. I've always been just a little bit fascinated by  blocking - that is, how to look natural while being theatrical, setting yourself up to deliver the next line in the best position, knowing what to do with your hands. With opera, not only do you have to figure that out, but you have to interact with the music and the conductor the entire time. It's not dancing (though sometimes it may be), but it's complicatedly rhythmic. To me, at least.

And then, of course, there's the singing: the haughty Musetta with her operatically arrogant laughter and Rodolfo who cries from the very pit of his gut at Mimi's bedside; the reprise of the themes, and never  knowing how Mimi came to be known by that name, anyway.

For the number of times I've seen opera performed on screen, or movies featuring people at operas for that matter, this was the first time I'd actually seen it in person (maybe I could also count Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera, both of which I love, but they were both in English and they weren't Puccini). It was all the clichéd things I'd hoped it would be and more. Mostly in the sense that I was on the verge of becoming a blubbering mess by the end of it (and so was my mom). I couldn't even speak until we got outside of the theater. I needed distance from that little universe where we had spent the last three hours getting to know these characters as they lived out their lives in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Even looking at people around me made me want to cry because I saw the tears in their eyes, too. It was hard to get over it. I still feel it, just thinking about it now.