This La bohème at Teatro di San Carlo in Naples was not too far away from the traditional idea one has of Puccini’s masterpiece. One reason why it is perhaps the most loved (and performed) opera ever written, is the ultimate meaning it gives to the term “romantic”, which will be forever welded together with the icon of the starving Bohemian artists living in a freezing garret in Paris. And this was the flavour we got from this staging.
Nonetheless, Francesco Saponara’s direction, although not awful, was not an asset to this production. There were positive aspects to it, like the lovely sense of the relationships one could perceive between the cast members, which lit up many moments, until their really strong reactions to Mimi's death. On the contrary, one weird idea was having Mimì’s dead body unexpectedly taken away at the end by four unknown mourners, which diluted the effects of one Puccini’s most famous dramatic devices, the last action frozen while the final chords resound tragically.
Fortunately, it is very difficult to perform La bohème badly, as the music and drama in it are so magnificent that it’s quite impossible not to appreciate any performance. Puccini's opera is an exquisitely built mechanism which can tolerate every possible staging idea, and continues to pour lyricism into the deafest ears.
But it is the way the director read the existential philosophy of the Bohemians that was most annoying: the young artists portrayed by Puccini and his librettists are indisputably children of the bourgeoisie, whose comforts they reject, choosing a (temporary) existence of happy poverty, with all the freedom and pleasures of goliardic life.
In the first two acts, they are no more than teenagers gaily overstepping ethical boundaries; but the very moment Mimì steps into the garret, the shadow of adulthood starts looming over their lives, to fully take form in the final scenes.
From this perspective, the four students' desperation being more picturesque than existential, Saponara’s choices did not make much sense overall: he seemed to pay the four comrades the compliment of taking their poverty too seriously, as social rebellion. So he has them wear beggar-style clothes, and turns Café Momus into a lower-class tavern instead of a venue for beautiful people, as it is supposed to be (would Alcindoro take Musetta there, otherwise?). Moreover, the scene in the Latin Quarter on Christmas Eve was loud, chaotic and packed even for as large a stage as the San Carlo’s. All stage actions and singing movements seemed left to the goodwill of the cast.
The last two acts of Bohème are more tragic than any other theatre piece, and this leaves every possible flaw unnoticed. In the end, with the death of Mimì, the four grow aware of their coming of age, finally called to adulthood and responsibility. One cannot help remembering what the famous dramatist Eugène Ionesco predicted about the French students who revolted in May 1968. "They will all become notaries"; many of them have.