Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
The bohemian protagonist of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème is the starving writer Rodolfo. On Christmas Eve, while his three attic roommates hit the town, he stays behind to finish an assignment. A young woman who apparently lives in his tenement but whom he’s never met knocks at the door, hoping he’ll light her candle. There’s no electricity, and she lacks a match. She starts to cough, she drops her key. Who is she? “I’m called Mimì,” the libretto reads, “but I don’t know why.” Mimì has no family or friends, she makes and sells embroidery and, in a matter of moments, she becomes his perfect partner, his dream of love and happiness made real, a miracle. Three months later, she dies of tuberculosis surrounded by his caring family of artist friends.
That well-known story has never been so clear or haunting to me as it was in Michael Pink’s translation of the opera to ballet. I know the music by heart, having sung along with my vinyl recording countless times when no one could hear me. Enchanted by the melodies and voices, I paid scant attention to the tale’s implications; in fact, I found the story overly simplistic, even annoying. But as dance theater, La Bohème became profound for me. It seems at least as much about family as romantic love. It’s about what beauty means; the dancers themselves seem swept up in it. It’s about the loss among a young society of something precious, something you could call by many names. It makes you feel that loss.
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I wish I had words adequate to describe the dancing on opening night. The entire company was at its best, better than ever, capable of anything and everything. As Mimì and Rodolfo, Luz San Miguel and Davit Hovhannisyan, finer every season, made Pink’s intoxicating, challenging choreography look as natural as breathing. As their sparring friends Marcello and Musetta, Timothy O’Donnell and Annia Hidalgo were just as perfect in their dancing and complete in their embrace of character. Garrett Glassman (Colline) and Parker Brasser-Vos (Schaunard) vividly completed this entirely credible family.
Perhaps to suggest that the Milwaukee Ballet—including Pink and the staff—is a real-life family, no preshow curtain stood between the stage world and the audience. Performers roamed the darkly lighted Paris streets. Stas Venglevski played “La Vie en Rose” on his accordion until the orchestra cut in with Puccini.
