The Met: Live in HD will return to Guild Hall on Saturday at 1 p.m. with Puccini's "La Boheme." Widely considered the world's most popular opera, it was composed between 1893 and 1895 and premiered in 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin.
Set in Paris around 1830, the story revolves around four struggling bohemians living together, whose lives are changed when a young woman, Mimi, knocks on their door looking to relight her candle, which had gone out in the cold stairwell. She and Rodolfo, a poet, fall in love, but as it becomes clear that Mimi is seriously ill, things take a darker turn.
Produced by Franco Zeffirelli, the production stars Juliana Grigoryan, a soprano, as Mimi, and Freddie De Tommaso, a tenor, as Rodolfo. Keri-Lynn Wilson will be at the podium.
Tickets are $30, $27 for members.
Site-Specific Dances, a performing arts collective of artists, choreographers, musicians, and designers currently in residence at Guild Hall, will share an in-process presentation of their new dance-theater work, "Love Letters: Cage to Cunningham," on Saturday at 7 p.m.
The performance is based on selected letters from "Love, Icebox: Letters From John Cage to Merce Cunningham," selected by The New York Times as one of the best art books of 2019.
The letters, spanning the years 1942-1946, reveal the interwoven nature of Cage's and Cunningham's artistic and personal lives. They contain moments of flirtation, humor, insecurity, joy, longing, arousal, and jealousy -- emotions specific to the letters, but also, as Guild Hall says, universal to human experiences of love and longing.
The piece unfolds as a series of vignettes that follow the emotional arc of the letters, combining media and live music with a new ensemble dance suite by Michael Spencer Phillips, the co-artistic director of the company with Dino Kiratzidis.
The set design brings together media elements drawn from the text of the letters and curated by Mr. Kiratzidis, in collaboration with Emma Kazaryan, a videographer, and Riley Hooker, a graphic designer. Adam Tendler joins the team as a John Cage specialist, performer, and adviser, along with the composers Warren Hildebrand and Matthew Ricketts.
The performance will be followed by a conversation among members of the creative team. Tickets are $25, $22.50 for members.
