Word: mimi
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Price has been a shrewd judge of her limitations as well as her talents. With few exceptions, she sang only parts suited to her voice and physique. She never sang those consumptive lost souls Mimi in La Boheme and Violetta in La Traviata, accurately observing, "I'm just too healthy for coughing spells." Although she toyed with the idea of tackling the Marschallin in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, she rightly realized that "Verdi is definitely my friend...
...irreverent music lover attends this sassy and unconventional La Boheme in a mood for sedition. That does not mean impatience with the soaring lyrical glories of Puccini's music?nobody boos a sunset. But Mimi, the consumptive Parisian seamstress, has been a dying duck since the opera's first performance in 1896, and her fog-witted lover Rodolfo, the poet, has moped melodiously for the same stretch. A certain amount of dust has gathered. Only the fustiest of traditionalists would grouch at the news that Joseph Papp's musical irregulars from the New York Shakespeare Festival have decided to give...
Marcel, the artist, tells Rodolfo, "I'm freezing my nuts off"). By the time Mimi and Rodolfo have fallen into their first-act clinch, as a mandolin plucks away in the twelve-piece theater band, sentimentalists are dabbing at their eyes...
That is the test: if the hankies come out, Boheme is a success. The shocker was that onlookers misted up not for Ronstadt but for another Mimi, tiny, strawberry-blond Soprano Patti Cohenour. (Lead duties are divided; Cohenour sings four of eight weekly performances; Ronstadt three, and another Mimi, Caroline Peyton, the remaining show.) The sweet-voiced Cohenour and her surprisingly strong Rodolfo, Country Singer Gary Morris, seemed lyrically in love. The other leads, a fine Marcel (Howard McGillin) and a brilliant Musette (Cass Morgan), took fire from them. The night before, Ronstadt and her Rodolfo, David Carroll, had sung...
...fault was Ronstadt's. Her voice seemed small and uncertain, and she was unable to move from her strong, rock-belter's low register to her silvery high notes without shifting gears awkwardly in her uncertain middle range, where most of Mimi's singing is done. It seems doubtful that her deficiencies are readily curable. She must have known early in rehearsal that the experts had been right to say that a pop singer could not make the leap to Boheme. She might have quit then and sunk a production that depended heavily on her name. That she stayed...