Gale Edwards’ savvy Bohème shows young love failing to survive Hitler’s springtime.

Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
January 4, 2015

Puccini’s La Bohème was very much his breakthrough work back in 1894 and it’s held a place in the rep of every opera company on the planet now for well over a hundred years. A tale of ‘starving’ artists struggling to maintain their ‘garret’ existence in the face of bourgeois conservatism and grasping landlords, it has spawned productions set anywhere and anyway from 1830s Paris to 2012 Vienna, taking in 1990 New York in the form of Broadway musical Rent along the way. Whether any director can now come up with anything new to say is debatable – and anyway, do audiences really care? Puccini’s blend of heady tunefulness, romantic sweep and youthful idealism is what is wanted, and frankly it takes a pretty bad production to prevent all of that coming across in spades.

As it turns out, Gail Edwards’ relocation of the action to 1930s Berlin is one of its smarter incarnations. A Weimar update usually involves a hefty political element, and that Edwards can’t quite find such an angle for the work with which she has...