When the Bermuda Festival’s next presentation, Puccini’s opera, ‘La Boh|0xe8|me’, opens at City Hall tomorrow evening, it will be a case of “old wine in a new vessel”.

Instead of being set in Paris circa 1830, as it was by the composer, Opera a la Carte has updated the era to the “iconoclastic-breaking years of the 1960s”.

The current production is still set in Paris, but it begins in the winter of 1967 and ends in 1968, the year of the student riots.

“This is a world that is about to give birth to the modern women’s movement, the gay movement and the new male/female consciousness,” founder-director Nicholas Heath says. “It is a time of great change, and in this production Mimi (soprano Gordana Kocstic) is the person who undergoes the biggest change. She has become extremely hippie-like and dies of drugs.”

Two other characters in the original opera are recast as major French icons of the ‘60s.

Puccini’s much-loved work, deemed to be the finest lyric opera ever written, is based on Henri Burger’s ‘La Vie de Boh|0xe8|me’. The drama unfolds amongst a group of impoverished students, including a poet and a painter and a group of their friends who are equally impecunious and adrift. Innocent love, lustful entanglements, abdication of responsibility, and a final, tragic scene of loss is at the heart of the story.

In Mr. Heath’s ‘modern’ version, the same passionate elements of the original story remain, but with a heightened fusion of politics, youthful dreams and intense group dynamics, bound together by food, wine and drugs.

Opera a la Carte specialises in innovative works in unique, intimate settings, and it has staged modern versions of other operas in the past. While ‘La Boh|0xe8|me’ is the ‘modern’ opera in its current repertoire, it also stages ‘Carmen’ and ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ traditionally.

According to Mr. Heath, the reason the company has chosen to modernise ‘La Bohéme’ — which, in terms of age, is already a ‘modern’ opera — “is to try and bring the intensity of modern relationships to everybody, and not exclude anyone”.

“The brilliant thing about the story is that it is so resilient that it actually does work for us in the context of that time scale (the 1960s),” he said.

The summer of love in Paris in the ‘60s later developed an intensity that spread out with young people, and this is what Opera a la Carte tries bring to its performances.

Traditionalist opera buffs need not take to the hills in horror, however, imaging that the libretto has been similarly transformed into hippie jargon. The director assures that, in that regard, the company has remained “very true” to the original.

“I feel very strongly you don’t change things for change’s sake,” Mr. Heath says. “As a company we have taken this journey with the piece, which feels right and secure, and I think it tells a very poignant story.”

Since it was not possible for the visiting company to bring its usual orchestra with it, “four hands piano” will play the score instead.

“The pianists have worked very hard on the arrangement for two pianos, and it is going to be very special,” the director promises.

The UK opera company was formed by Mr. Heath in 1933 and draws on performers from the leading UK and European opera houses. Its repertoire ranges from cabaret to grand opera, and Mr. Heath’s inspired leadership is the fulcrum around which the company revolves.

l ‘La Bohe|0xe8|me’ is being performed tomorrow, Friday and Saturday nights at 8 p.m. For full details see the Bermuda Calendar.