Bohemian, no rhapsody

Seamstress Mimi (played by Yao Hong) and poet Rudolph (Warren Mok) fall in love at first sight in the new production of Puccini's La Boheme.

Western opera is not as popular in China as Peking Opera so a local angle is sometimes necessary to make it more accessible.

Turandot is an obvious choice as it is supposedly set in ancient China but director Chen Xinyi, the reigning queen of "re-imagining" opera settings, has displayed a masterful touch for either superfluity or obtuseness when staging the Puccini classic. She does not seem to care much for the innate musicality, but rather, for utterly ill-conceived extrapolations.

Fortunately, opera is not really a director's art. It belongs first and foremost to the composer. No matter how you stage them, Turandot and La Boheme, when properly sung and played, will wow audiences. And China has a lineup of talent that can fill up the opera hall of the brand new National Center for the Performing Arts with glorious voices.

I tend to see art director Gao Guangjian as the real director. He consistently comes up with sets that put the "grand" into grand opera or grand theater. He seems to have graduated from the Franco Zeffirelli school of set designing; his sets for Turandot make full use of all the technical wizardry of the theater and still manage not to overshadow the singers. For La Boheme, the sets are so mammoth actors have to take mime-like bows between scene changes in order to leave ample time for all the action behind the curtain.

The current production of La Boheme opens with a film clip, which you could be forgiven for believing had been directed by commercially gifted filmmaker Feng Xiaogang. It's so suffused with product placements that Puccini might have regretted not inserting all the brands of Parisian haute couture into his perennially popular love story.