Review: La Boheme, New Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham

Images of the Eiffel Tower, bottles of red wine in wicker baskets, guards in big hats and ladies in bonnets featured large in Ellen Kent's Saturday night production of La Boheme.

Indeed, one whole act seemed to a moving representation of a Renoir painting, with the colourful cafe crowd clustered around tables raising glasses, arms round shoulders, laughing, fighting, smouldering and swapping kisses.

Puccini's melodramatic tale of poverty, love and tragedy was portrayed beautifully. Soloists worked well with a chorus of borrowed singers from around the UK, stage-school children and a pug dog called Kipper to give audiences a proper operatic treat.

Ecaterina Danu as fragile seamstress Mimi was a delight and Iurie Gisca's deep heart-rending tones of Marcello were a joy to listen to. One of the most charismatic voices, however, came from Vadym Chernihovskiy as philosopher Colline, whose moving song about having to sell his favourite coat to buy medicine for the ailing Mimi was a spine-tingler - especially as many other arias were overpowered by the orchestra, under the baton of Vasyl Vasylenko.

La Boheme tells the tale of four struggling and poverty-stricken artists living in the shadow of the French capital, who see two of their number lost in passion to two very different women. Their story is steeped in passion and tragedy, and not the pantomime theme, this production affords it.

I saw no need for the artists to skip around their garret table or to give themselves pretend moustaches with sausages. It had me half-expecting someone to be hit around the head with a frying pan or to have a bucketful of feathers thrown over their head.

Luckily later scenes saw the production gain more gravitas aligned with beauty - the winter scene complete with snow was haunting and the final rapturous applause well deserved.

By Sarah Cowen-Strong