Chicago On the Aisle - Recommended
"...Puccini's wondrous score is fortunately director-proof and it was exceedingly well served by an attractive cast of singers who really looked and sounded like hapless young people grappling with life's pleasures and vicissitudes."
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...In La Bohème, Lyric gets everything right: an audience favorite to start the season given a fresh and faithful production packed with familiar faces and rising stars. If you liked it as much as this reviewer, be sure to tell your friends about it. Better yet, go see it again and take them with you. There are more performances in January."
Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...No matter what the weather’s like outside, it will be a picturesque winter season at the Lyric with their new production of La bohème. The first of what could nearly be called a season of crowd pleasers, Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 melodic take on verismo is one of the few operas to have remained in pop culture. This new production sparkles with the scenery of nineteenth century Paris, an easily-accessible score led by a new conductor, and a cast that displays real tenderness and ribaldry."
WTTW - Recommended
"...Throughout, conductor Domingo Hindoyan was winningly sensitive to the balance between the Lyric orchestra and the distinctive voices in the opera's crucially intimate scenes. And you might even be forgiven if you find yourself humming Larson's "Would You Light My Candle?" on the way out of the theater."
Chicagoland Theater Reviews - Highly Recommended
"...The Lyric Opera orchestra serves Puccini's music handsomely, Venezuelan conductor Domingo Hindoyan beautifully drawing out all the score's romantic sonorities. The storyline may meander but the glories of the music and the singing never stop. As I was waiting in line to enter the theater a man asked a little girl standing in front of me if this was her first opera. She nodded shyly and the man assured her that "La boheme" was a wonderful romantic story and she would love it And so she should. The girl is starting on the audience fast track, watching performers like Fabiano and Agresta as they ravish the ear and the tear duct telling one of the great love stories in opera."
The Fourth Walsh - Highly Recommended
"...LA BOHEME is one of my favorite operas. Puccini composed the perfect opera for falling in love and out of love… and in love again. His music captures everything from innocent flirtation to soulmate commitment to steamy seduction to tortured desperation. I’ve had the great fortune to experience LA BOHEME three times. This new production is my favorite!"
Chicagoland Musical Theatre - Highly Recommended
"...The intelligent work is doubled by brilliant Lighting Designer Mimi Jordan Sherin who renders the masterful tableau with long-starved warmth in Acts one and two, and a comparatively bleak night and stale daylight in Acts three and four that lends a pallid tone to the once-white sets before intermission. But her brightest achievement is the pane of moonlight that strikes through the bohemian skylight."
Chicago Theater and Arts - Highly Recommended
"...But what really made the opening a “happening” was Fabiano’s soaring delivery of each aria from “Che gelida manina” to “La più divina delle poesia,” to “Ebenne no, non lo so.”"
Picture This Post - Highly Recommended
"...Lyric Opera though, no stranger to perfection, had picked LA BOHÈME for the season opening, with a production so compelling that the lobby glamour was vacuumed quickly out of mind. This is Puccini's opera, perhaps semi-autobiographical, depicting the life and loves of struggling artists, Bohemians, who live for their art and struggle to pay rent or put food on the table. These Bohemians are young men who fall in love with a sincerity that feels so refreshingly quaint in these in your face grab-them-by-their-pussy times. In their marketing materials, the Lyric refers to LA BOHÈME as the first Rent. And, as pointed out at the Lyric's free Millennium Park concert a month or so ago, the score features what might be the world's best-known love-at-first-sight scene."
