The audience are relaxed in the outdoor setting of the Quarry Ampitheatre and there are plenty of laughs as Rodolfo and his mates horse around with TikTok dance moves and Harry Potter pencil duels on the square elevated stage that designer Robbie Harold utilises as a bachelor pad.

The result of all this irreverent interference with Puccini’s original? A production that reignites the power of opera, and cuts to the quick of life today. In the original 1910 opera Mimi suffers from TB, but Shaw’s recontextualization helps us find greater empathy for the suffering of these characters whose medical vulnerability, until recently, felt so far removed. Here’s the twist: the love-lives of the Bohemians are complicated not just by poverty but also by COVID-19. And its not just toilet paper shortages Mimi has health complications which jeopardise her relationship with Rodolfo because she should be isolating. Harriet Marshall and Paul O’Neill as Mimi and Rodolfo in FFO’s new production of ‘La Boheme’. This new production, with Penny Shaw making her directorial debut, retains the company’s irreverent approach: the opera is cut from 135 minutes to 90, the libretto significantly updated to reflect the setting in contemporary Paris, and there is the (scandalous to the purists) addition of French cabaret songs to open each act. La Boheme, Puccini’s window into the love life of 19th century Parisian Bohemians, was FFO’s first full opera production in 2017.

I shake my head in wonder at the incredible efforts of artists as they continue to bring us their art. This year, as COVID’s Omicron variant destabilises life in WA even further, Freeze Frame Opera have produced a cathartic production of La Boheme that couldn’t be more pertinent to our current experience.ĭown a singer (Teddy Tahu Rhodes was kept out by the border closure), scrambling to adjust to last minute 50% capacity limits and with COVID approaching its peak in WA, it was a minor miracle that none of the cast or creatives had COVID and the show went ahead. When COVID-19 first hit two years ago they pivoted on a dime and within weeks were providing work for singers and balm for audiences, with their socially distanced street performances from the back of a truck. Freeze Frame Opera (FFO) are the arts community’s first responders.

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