Culture & Arts Notes
By Ian Rosales Casocot
I love the fact that in Dumaguete, I can tell myself: “I want to end this busy week by watching opera.”
And watch I did, straight from my last class of the day, a barebones production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème at Silliman University’s Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium.
This famous story of starving bohemian artists—a poet, a painter, a musician, a philosopher, a seamstress, and a singer—was presented by the SU Culture & Arts Council, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Office of the Dumaguete City Mayor, and the Dumaguete City Tourism Office, and featured the performers from Viva Voce Voice Lab.
Almost the entirety of the opera was staged; an abridged version, yes—but still significantly whole, the arc of the love story and the narrative of friendship intact.
That said, it was also not a full-fledged production—there was no orchestra [only a piano] and there were no elaborate costumes. All there was were great performances, a fantastic sense of gusto, and the beauty of the human voice. Often, that’s enough.
The show was packaged as an educational outreach program, to teach contemporary Filipino audiences about what opera is all about, and to make a traditionally daunting art form be accessible to those who have only heard about what opera is like and are too intimidated to watch any.
Hence, the helpful introduction by artistic director Camille Lopez Molina before the show began [she was very funny]. Hence, the simplicity of the staging.
Hence, the supertitles projected on screen that directly translated the Italian lyrics the performers were singing.
Molina also explained that the company specifically sought out a performance at the Luce because this was Viva Voce’s experiment with raw voice projection, no amplification, in a suitable theater: the Luce remains the only theater in the country with the best acoustics.
Truth to tell, this was my first opera, and although it was done in this format, I was grateful for what it was—because everyone in the audience truly enjoyed the musical spectacle onstage: an audience of mostly students awww’d at the lighting quick romance between the two leads, arrrgh’d at the seeming red-flagness of Rodolfo when he wanted to break up with Mimi, and ohhhh’d at Mimi’s final demise.
I can readily tell when a Luce audience is appreciative [and Dumaguete is notoriously hard to please], and the one-night performance of Nov. 15 was one for the books.
At the end, I also realized that this show signaled the end of the pandemic for me. At least culturally speaking. The last show I watched at the Luce before lockdown started in 2020 was Rent, the Jonathan Larson musical that borrows heavily from La Bohème.
Four year later, I am watching the OG material on the same stage. My pandemic has been properly bookended.
