Amanda: La Boheme vs. RENT

I’ve been wanting to see La Boheme fore quite awhile now and I’m really happy we got to see it on our trip here in Prague. As you probably know by now, I am pretty obsessed with the modern musical RENT, which is based on the story line presented in La Boheme so I was very interested to see the similarities and differences between the two works.

Although I obviously knew both plot lines were going to be somewhat similar I had no idea just how alike the two works are, and found myself constantly getting songs from RENT in my head during La Boheme. Many of the scenes in the opera are used in the musical, in particular the initial meeting of Rodolfo and Mimi with the lighting of the candle, the trip to the café with all of their friends, and the final scene of them together with Mimi in her weakened, dying state.

Even the characters names in the opera and musical are similar, Rodolfo in La Boheme is switched to Roger in RENT, Marcello is switched to Mark and both works share the same name for the leading female character, Mimi. The music in RENT also makes many references to the opera, with one of the songs is actually being titled “la vie boheme” and later on in the musical one of the characters directly references the song “musetta’s waltz” from La Boheme.

After viewing both works I must say that I like the direction the musical takes the love story much better than the opera, and I found the connection between the two characters in La Boheme to be a bit unconvincing. Their relationship is very rushed and insincere while RENT takes a lot of time to point out the struggle between the two characters and slowly build their love. The ending of the Opera and Musical are also a bit different, and I think that RENT’s version has more depth to it, incorporating and interweaving the stories of many more characters and their struggles with their lovers as well.

Another point I wanted to add about the opera is on the topic of the subtitles. Although I had never heard of and Opera having subtitles I thought it would be convenient to actually understand what was going on in English, rather than straining to pick out a few Italian words I know. The opposite of this happened, and I actually found them to be incredibly distracting and I think they took away from the power of the opera. English is certainly not a romance language and a lot of times throughout the opera I had to keep myself from laughing because although the singing was absolutely beautiful, having what they were saying actually displayed on the screen was ridiculous. I certainly understand why many writers of opera refuse to let their works be translated into different languages, and I appreciated the opera much more in the second act when I ignored the subtitle screen completely.