La Bohème | Minnesota Opera, Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, St. Paul, 2024
Giacomo Puccini’s beloved masterpiece of youthful passion and tragic loss opened Minnesota Opera’s 61st season, running from May 4-19, 2024 at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. Directed by Rodula Gaitanou with musical direction by Christopher Franklin, this production brought fresh energy to one of opera’s most frequently performed works, telling the story of the struggling Parisian bohemians—poet Rodolfo, painter Marcello, philosopher Colline, and musician Schaunard—and Rodolfo’s doomed love affair with the seamstress Mimì.
Performed in Italian with English supertitles, the production featured Won Whi Choi as Rodolfo and Melinda Whittington making her Minnesota Opera and role debut as Mimì, alongside Joo Won Kang as Marcello. The production ran approximately 2 hours 35 minutes over nine performances, serving as the final offering of Minnesota Opera’s season and demonstrating the enduring power of Puccini’s score to move contemporary audiences.
Set Design Vision
takis’ set design creates the intimate world of 1830s Paris Latin Quarter, where artistic ambition and poverty intersect in cramped garret studios, bustling cafés, and snow-covered city gates. The design must facilitate rapid transitions between the four contrasting acts: the freezing bohemian garret where Rodolfo and Mimì first meet; the chaotic warmth of Café Momus on Christmas Eve; the cold dawn at the Barrière d’Enfer city gate; and the return to the garret for Mimì’s death.
Each setting requires distinct atmospheric qualities—the garret’s creative disorder and makeshift warmth, the café’s festive abundance and social spectacle, the outdoor scenes’ expansive coldness, and the final act’s devastating simplicity. The design captures how environment reflects emotional state: the garret’s initial bohemian joy transforms into the site of unbearable loss; the café’s celebration contrasts with Mimì and Rodolfo’s growing difficulties; the outdoor scenes’ exposure mirrors emotional vulnerability.
The production’s visual approach balances period authenticity with theatrical poetry, creating spaces that feel historically grounded while supporting the opera’s heightened emotional reality. The design allows intimate moments—Rodolfo and Mimì’s first encounter, their final farewell—to unfold with appropriate focus while accommodating the ensemble energy of the café scene and the bohemians’ camaraderie.
Costume designer Trevor Bowen’s work complements the set design, distinguishing the impoverished bohemians from the bourgeois café patrons, capturing Musetta’s conspicuous elegance, and showing how Mimì’s illness is reflected in her appearance.
Creative Team
- Set Designer: takis
- Costume Designer: Trevor Bowen
- Director: Rodula Gaitanou
- Conductor: Christopher Franklin
- Lighting Designer: D.M. Wood
- Composer: Giacomo Puccini
- Libretto: Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (based on Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème)
Production Context
La Bohème premiered in Turin in 1896 and has since become one of opera’s most beloved works, performed more frequently than almost any other opera. Puccini’s score combines soaring romantic melodies with intimate character moments and vibrant ensemble scenes, creating an emotional arc that has moved audiences for over a century. The opera’s portrait of artistic life, young love, and the cruel randomness of loss resonates universally, while its specific depiction of 1830s Paris bohemian culture has influenced how we romanticize artistic struggle.
Minnesota Opera, founded in 1963, has become one of America’s leading regional opera companies, known for ambitious programming that includes both core repertoire and world premieres. The company’s commitment to accessible opera presentation—performing works in their original languages with supertitles—maintains artistic integrity while ensuring audience comprehension.
This 2024 production demonstrated how La Bohème continues to speak to contemporary audiences despite countless productions worldwide. The opera’s themes—economic precarity among young artists, the intensity of first love, the fragility of health and happiness—remain startlingly relevant. Puccini’s genius lies in creating music that makes these universal experiences feel both intimately personal and theatrically heightened, allowing each generation to discover the work anew.
The production’s success—noted for its “entertaining and energetic” staging and powerful vocal performances—reaffirmed why La Bohème maintains its place at the heart of the operatic repertoire, continuing to introduce new audiences to opera while giving longtime fans fresh perspectives on a familiar masterpiece.