La bohème review — patchy Puccini goes to the movies

★★★☆☆

Well, Act II works, at least. Natascha Metherell’s new staging for Opera Holland Park transfers Puccini’s opera to a 1950s Italian film studio, where a pompous movie director (who turns out to be Musetta’s sugar daddy) is making a film that’s set — you guessed it — in the Latin quarter of Paris featured in La bohème.

You could argue, generously, that this ponderously circular concept is a way of metaphorically linking the impermanence and make-believe of movies with the transitory nature of love, life and happiness, at least as experienced by Mimi.

To my eyes, however, it seems contrived merely so that Act II — the bustling Christmas Eve scene at Café Momus — can be staged as a series of short

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