The L train was out-of-order and the night was freezing, but that didn’t stop a crowd from packing into a Bushwick warehouse earlier this month for the last weekend of Puccini’s La Bohème, staged by the Brooklyn-based LoftOpera.

Larisa Martinez as Musetta in LoftOpera’s “La Bohème” (click to enlarge)


Started in 2013 by Daniel Ellis-Ferris and Brianna Maury, the organization is aiming to bring opera to a community that might not ordinarily engage with the art form, which in its usual venues can seem untouchable, distant, and stuffy. LoftOpera also gives young performers a place to perform, and get paid.

“There were interesting shows happening in the Brooklyn loft music space, but opera was noticeably missing,” Ellis-Ferris said in an interview with Grey magazine. “Many of my opera singer friends told me that there were limited opportunities for young people to sing in the city.”

LoftOpera dedicated their first year to Mozart, tackling Don Giovanni last May and staging the Marriage of Figaro in Gowanus in November. La Bohème, the classic drama of artists attempting to survive in 1830s Paris, was transferred to a Brooklyn setting, its libretto slimmed down a bit, and its usually elaborate stagings left behind for benches on three sides of the 1896 warehouse off the Jefferson stop, the subtitles projected onto one of the worn brick walls. It wasn’t a total modernization, though; the music was still the enthralling emotional arias, and a full orchestra filled the broad space with layers of sound that you don’t ordinarily get from the cheap seats in the family circle of Lincoln Center (tickets were an affordable $20, and sold out).