La bohème, Scottish Opera, Glasgow review: ‘a show to delight and captivate’

First unveiled in 2017, director/designers André Barbe and Renaud Doucet’s big, bold, colourful production of La bohème for Scottish Opera has an awful lot going for it – not least its exuberant theatricality and sometimes staggering, stage-filling activity.

Glasgow’s Theatre Royal can rarely have looked quite so bursting at the seams with a 30-strong chorus, gaggles of kids, plus on-stage marching bands, flea market and Parisian pavement cafes, all lovingly (and convincingly) conjured in a kind of fairytale fantasy in Barbe and Doucet’s teeming creation. Whether the sometimes dizzying lavishness serves to intensify or swamp the quiet, fragile emotions at the heart of Puccini’s opera, however, is another question entirely. There’s a danger that you might come out of the show wowed, but not particularly moved.

That said, Barbe and Doucet’s cast are just as vivid and characterful as the production overall. Hye-Youn Lee is an intensely focused Mimì, a fulcrum of calm amid the show’s sometimes frenetic activity, with quite a remarkable clarity and cleanness to her strongly defined soprano. Mario Chang makes for a surprisingly hearty, bounding Rodolfo – quite literally, in leaping across the Parisian garret’s furniture – and their Act I meeting simmers nicely with awkward eagerness and naive desire. Rhian Lois is a glittering Musetta – complete with blingy pet leopard – and Roland Wood a gloriously gruff Marcello, though their Act II reconciliation feels somewhat overshadowed by Barbe and Doucet’s frenetic activity in Café Momus. Edward Jowle, too, offers a particularly memorable Schaunard, all physical comedy and barely suppressed emotion.

Scottish Opera music director Stuart Stratford matches the director/designers’ opulence with a wonderfully rich, colourful account of Puccini’s score, tellingly alive to its shifting emotions, with deeply expressive, evocative playing from the company’s Orchestra. While it’s perhaps not a production to challenge or provoke, it’s surely a show to delight and captivate.