OPERA
" La Boheme." At the New Theatre.
FOR those who heard Melba in the part the music of Mimi is irrevocably associated with the tones of her voice, sweeter than any flute, if slightly more nasal. This is not to say that there have been no other good Mimis, but Melba's voice fitted this music like the most perfectly fashioned glove. There were echoes of that voice in Miss Linda Parker's singing last Monday, when the Sadler's Wells Company opened their season at the New Theatre with Puccini's opera. There are holes and snags in Miss Parker's voice, and it is not yet so rightly placed that its lightest tones ring out into the auditorium. But it has a quality that merits the expenditure of hard work and the application of discipline, which would develop it into a perfected instrument. Ai it is, Miss Parker gave a most engaging and attractive performance.
Of the rest of the singing there is little to record. It was adequate and quite unexciting—and a performance of Boherne without vocal excitement is hardly a performance of Boheme. Nevertheless, there was some compensation in the careful attention that had been given to the dramatic side of the production by Mr. Tyrone Guthrie. I did not like all his notions. The burlesque ballet in the last act is out of keeping with the style and period of the opera, and anyhow has been better done (and then done to death) in a hundred revues. Nor was the Café Momus scene kept lively enough, perhaps from lack of sufficient personnel. Never did a party so conspicuously fail to go, until Musetta arrived on the scene in the person of Miss Rose Morris, who gave a brilliant performance a la Toulouse- Lautrec. Not all the singers did such full justice to Mr. Guthrie's ideas, and two of the Bohemians seemed to belong to a different
period from the rest. I will not assert that no French painter of the mid-nineteenth century looked like a healthy English rugger- player of today, but I do say that Mr. Hargreave's unwigged head and clean-shaven face appeared extremely anachronistic. There is nothing, except a live horse, that looks so out of place on the stage
Previous page
