Director
Baz Luhrmann

Cast
Mimi : Cheryl Barker
Rodolfo : David Hobson
Marcello : Roger Lemke
Musetta : Christine Douglas
Colline : Gary Rowley
Schaunard : David Lemke
Alcindoro : John Bolton-Wood
Benoit : Graeme Ewer
Parpignol : Jin Tea Kim
Customs sergeant : John Fernon
Customs officer : Richard Alexander

The Australian Opera Chorus
The Australian Opera Children's Chorus
Australian Opera And Ballet Orchestra
Julian Smith (conductor)


Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet and Strictly Ballroom director Baz Luhrmann was responsible for this brilliant, visually stunning updated staging of Puccini's opera by Australian Opera. Cheryl Barker and David Hobson play Mimi and Rodolfo in a deprived post-war Paris.

Conducted by Julian Smith and recorded live at the Sydney Opera House, this production of Puccini's perennial favourite also had the same design team who worked with Luhrmann on Strictly Ballroom - Catherine Martin and Bill Marron. They crafted a compelling and artful reworking of the opera, using the post-war privations of 1950s Paris as a convincing setting, and capturing, above all else, the youthfulness and intensity of the story with a raw sincerity.

Reviewing the results, the Star Observer wrote: "This Bohème throbs with passion and its vivid feeling of reality serves to make the story even more poignant: Luhrmann is not afraid as a director to embrace the much-derided concepts of love and romance and run with them. Rather than overly complicate matters, he exposes and then celebrates the simplicity of the material."

After the American PBS showing of this recording, John J. O'Connor wrote in the New York Times, "Familiarity can breed ennui, but an occasional jolt of imaginative freshness can work wonders. Irresistible proof is available in this Bohème... Like the opera itself, Mr Luhrmann's interpretation is shamelessly and quite gloriously romantic. By the slow close of its final curtain, there will not, I assure you be a dry eye in anybody's house... Watch this smashing production and be seduced all over again."