Skip to content
Arts & Culture
Link copied to clipboard

Opera Philadelphia announces this year’s free Opera on the Mall

Tickets are available starting Aug. 14

The cafe scene from Opera Philadelphia's La bohème at the Academy of Music this past spring. The opera will be shown in an HD screening on Independence Mall in September.
The cafe scene from Opera Philadelphia's La bohème at the Academy of Music this past spring. The opera will be shown in an HD screening on Independence Mall in September.Read moreSteven Pisano (custom credit)

It’s now official: This year’s opera on the mall will be … Puccini’s La bohème.

A free HD broadcast of Opera Philadelphia’s spring production of the work will be screened on Independence Mall at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 14, raising the curtain on the company’s 019 festival, which runs from Sept. 18-29.

This production of La bohème stars tenor Evan LeRoy Johnson as Rodolfo and Vanessa Vasquez as Mimi, and uses projections that draw on works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation. Corrado Rovaris conducts.

“The lively opening scene was almost like a concerto for orchestra with so many incidental solos popping in and out. As the opera intensified, every scene involving Mimi had an extremely specific orchestral color that deepened the emotional situation onstage,” wrote David Patrick Stearns in his Inquirer review this past April. “La bohème can touch something so elemental that it ceases to be something artificial happening onstage. It’s your life.”

Free tickets to the screening are available starting Wed., Aug. 14, at 10 a.m., at operaonthemall.org, or 215-732-8400.