The Justice

La Bohème is not an intellectual opera à la Zauberflöte or some high-minded Wagnerian epic. At Saturday night's "Bravo Bohème" performance at the Shubert Theater, tickets to which were sold at half-price to young professionals and provided by the Boston Cultural Arts Club at $10, even the singing wasn't brilliant: Rodolfo (Sean Panikkar) weakened at the extremes of his range and even Mimì (Jill Gardner) was periodically underpowered.

But La Bohème doesn't need profundity and virtuosity to resound, especially with today's college students. We are both prized and reviled for our idealism-idealism that is anthropomorphized perfectly in Mimì, the tragically tubercular heroine. She pours out her heart to Rodolfo virtually the moment she meets him, confiding how she loves the gentle beauty of flowers and the spring and craves the first touch of sunshine in April. Mimì even finds comfort in her menial embroidery simply because she embroiders the roses she so adores; she is grossly optimistic to the point of self-delusion.

And Rodolfo, the impassioned poet, is all too ready to love and then, barely an adoring aria later, to try and cajole Mimì into bed with him. (If that doesn't recall college life, what does?) His ribaldry and silliness with his friends, particularly the glorious, farcical cacophony of the second act, reveals that despite his apparent desire to achieve literary renown, he does not yet have the maturity to confront the implications of his situation. Like the college student, his poverty is a jolly one in which he mocks the rich and weaves around the hazards of his lifestyle.

Then Mimì finally expires, and with her death comes the death of the bohemians' idealism, the children's lives they led throughout the first few acts. As Musetta (played to saucy perfection by Kimwana Doner) cries, Mimì is "an angel sent down from heaven," and when consumption claims the angel, Rodolfo and his entourage must confront the end of their poetry. The average college student's lover doesn't keel over during her senior year from tuberculosis, but what does fade is the kittens-and-rainbows worldview to which she tends to fall prey. Throughout the sobering college experience and especially after the incredibly sobering graduation experience, the realization that one day optimism and idealism must fade crashes over each of us like the grief-stricken chord that signals Rodolfo's realization that Mimì has died. And this is one key reason why the opera is so superior to RENT, that overused morality vehicle and Bohème takeoff. In the musical (which, it must be said, made some much-needed statements about gay rights, HIV/AIDS, poverty and homelessness and also provided some fun and melodic rock ballads), Mimi is revived from her own terminal illness by the song of her poet-cum-guitarist, Roger. She lives to instruct the cast and audience to live "no day but today," but college students have no truck with living each day to its fullest, its most exuberant and most recreational.

Puccini's Mimì, on the other hand, dies as she must, reaching for her cutely flowered bonnet, a luxurious muff over her hands, and it is this that is the best lesson to the college audience. The part of us all that reaches optimistically for roses must wither to some extent to give us the maturity to comprehend obstacles and form realistic goals. Some of us will change the world, but until Mimì dies, it is hard to realize that not everyone can.

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