La Bohème

Larson transposed Puccini's opera to the East Village, one century on almost to the year. He said so plainly; it is not a resemblance somebody noticed afterwards. The mapping is close enough to list:

• Rodolfo and Mimì become Roger and Mimi, and she still lives downstairs and still knocks because her candle has gone out
• Marcello and Musetta become Mark and Maureen; Colline becomes Collins; Schaunard becomes Angel
• Benoît the landlord becomes Benny, and is given a reason to have changed sides
• Tuberculosis becomes HIV/AIDS, which is the substitution the whole piece turns on

Musetta's waltz, the Café Momus scene and the death in the final act all have direct counterparts.

• The core tragic love-story structure is heavily echoed: young writer + vulnerable woman + love + illness + separation + death.
• The bohemian community of artists, writers, poverty, and romanticized Parisian artistic life carries over.
• Christian/Rodolfo and Satine/Mimì have clear parallels, particularly Christian as the young writer and Satine as the dying beloved.
• Luhrmann borrows the heightened melodrama, theatricality, emotional excess, and operatic sensibility.
• Love, poverty, illness, sacrifice, youth, artistic life, and death are central to both.

Moulin Rouge! takes the operatic romantic tragedy model and transforms it into a modern pop musical.

From all the filmed version of the opera, this is one of the most iconic.

La bohème is an adaptation of Murger's work, but it is quite a loose one. Puccini and his librettists took the characters, setting, individual episodes, and general bohemian world from Scènes de la vie de bohème, then reorganized them into a much tighter tragic love story. Murger has several different romantic relationships and characters. Puccini's librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa took those scattered episodes and concentrated them around Rodolfo and Mimì.