Opera

Opera forever struggles to be cool, and will as long as its stars struggle with their weight. But Washington National Opera's season-opening La Bohème, a new production that will be simulcast to educational institutions - including Temple University, Princeton University and Bryn Mawr College, mainly for students but the general public will also be admitted - at 2 p.m. Sunday, is such a fashion slave that it borders on apologizing for the art form. Still, under such outreach circumstances, is that a minus?
Luckily, solidity is found where it matters most: Orchestrally, Puccini's ever-fresh score is in spirited form under Emmanuel Villaume. And though the singers seem to have been cast as much for looks as voice, the singing is good enough, even notable in the case of Vittorio Grigolo, who studied the leading tenor role of Rodolfo with Luciano Pavarotti in the months before his death.
But as much as La Bohème has withstood and benefited from high-concept productions in the past, this one is potentially misleading. The liberties taken in Mariusz Trelinski's production, seen at the Saturday premiere at the Kennedy Center, go beyond the usual updating, though that element is definitely there. The setting is the Manhattan club scene, where tuberculosis (the central disease of La Bohème) is making a comeback. The production is steeped in sex - more than in most renderings of this story of young Parisian artists falling in and out of love while death hovers over its heroine, Mimi. The Act II Christmas Eve scene at Cafe Momus has no children clamoring for toys but partyers impersonating Elvis and Divine.
The problem is surtitles: They often modernize librettos for the sake of clarity; here, the meaning is skewed and rewritten. When a production goes this far to refit a classic, why not just write a new one (as did Jonathan Larson, brilliantly, with Rent)?