I actually really liked La Boheme. I loved the drama and theatrics of it, and especially Mimi’s voice. Rent was also good, I saw a lot of similarities. But overall I think I preferred the opera. I liked how they kept the core ideas the same but adjusted the rest of the plot to fit with the times. In both the opera and the movie, the main cast are artists just trying to get by. In the opera, the “main” illness is tuberculosis while in the movie, it’s AIDS. So, they changed it to make it more relevant to the time it was set in. It also conveyed the message that a disease doesn’t belong to or come from a single group of people, since tuberculosis was also stigmatized. I appreciated how in the movie, the characters either had the same names as in the opera or ones that started with the same letter. It made it a lot easier to remember who was supposed to emulate who so I could actively compare.
I liked the opera more because it just felt like more of an experience. The sets were so well done and from where we were sitting, it felt like I was watching a mini show which actually added to it all for me. Even though I couldn’t understand the words directly, the translations on the screens were good enough that I could like hear them in English in my head in the ways they were being sung. Very cool!
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