Florentine Opera’s ‘La bohème’ in Bronzeville

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Florentine Opera La Boheme

Shifting La bohème from the Left Bank to Milwaukee’s Bronzeville? It’s been long in coming. The Florentine Opera scheduled the production for 2020—but Covid intervened. The revamped Puccini was then slated for the Florentine’s 2021-22 season—and delayed again. At long last, the reimagined La bohèmewill be performed by the Florentine Opera, April 19-21. 

Stage director Nadja Simmonds came on board a year and a half ago after directing the Florentine’s school tours, including Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel for kids. “I didn’t grow up around opera,” says Simmonds, adding that she found working with “nontraditional” opera audiences exciting. “I got to make it lively and friendly and focus on the stories, so everyone could understand them.”

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Photo: The Florentine Opera

Nadja Simmonds

Nadja Simmonds

With that experience in mind, the Florentine’s General Director Maggie Oplinger reached out to Simmonds for La bohème set in 1940s Bronzeville instead of 1830s Paris. “I said, ‘Sure! I know La bohème —it’s Rent! And I love Rent!’” Simmonds recalls.

Milwaukee’s Bronzeville was a thriving, predominantly Black neighborhood north of Downtown, with Third Street (now Martin Luther King Drive) as one of its main business arteries. In the segregated America of the era, Bronzeville was exemplary as a self-contained community with churches, nightclubs, record stores, funeral parlors, butcher shops, cinemas, businesses of all kinds—and most of all, street after street of family homes. Much of Bronzeville was lost, razed by ill-conceived urban development in the ‘60s. But in recent years, Bronzeville has been remembered in books and essays.

The Florentine’s La bohème will be sung in Italian (with supertitles visible overhead), and although Puccini’s music will not be reimagined as jazz, the original libretto has been modified to reflect 1940s Milwaukee, complete with references to the Regal Theater, Schuster’s department store and the Ambrosia chocolate works. According to Simmonds, Lawrence E. Moten III’s scenic design will incorporate Cream City brick and other visual touchstones of Old Milwaukee. Other highlights will include an ethnically mixed children’s chorus recruited from St. Marcus Lutheran School, “singing and moving around the big marketplace at Christmas in Act Two,” Simmonds says.

La bohème is arguably opera’s most enduring love story, and the romance between Rodolfo (performed by Chaz’men Williams-Ali) and Mimi (by Michelle Johnson) is central. However, La bohème in Bronzeville also focuses on “the joy of the community, even with the hardships they faced—how beautiful this community was, how family-oriented it was, a place so rich with history,” Simmonds says.

The Florentine Opera will perform La bohème, April 19-21 at the Marcus Performing Arts Center’s Uihlein Hall. For tickets and more information, visit https://www.florentineopera.org/.