And it leads an audience to sort of go with the story and use their own imagination.” It kind of allows the audience to see physically something happening beyond the music. “He’s outlining the solitude, the despondency of being alone - really, really alone. “I think for the newcomer this will be tricky to figure out,” Pérez said. As he approaches his end, Mimì’s spirit lives.

These are all apparitions of Rodolfo’s distant youth. There are doppelgängers and an invented white-faced mime Rodolfo imagines, sort of a herald of death. By Day 159, the musician Schaunard and philosopher Colline have expired, too. Supertitles tell the audience they are viewing Day 126 of a mission: “Expedition in danger - off course - engines inoperative - life-support resources almost exhausted.” The landlord, Benoit, is dead before the opening note and his lines reassigned. A body double dancer hangs outside a window in an extravehicular repair mission. Mimì wears a red dress and Musetta emerges from a shiny curtain to sing her waltz while hugging a stripper pole, twirling a feather boa and peeling off a dressing gown and long gloves, as if in a Paris nightclub. Men in space suits amble in low-gravity gaits and nap in sleep pods, mixed in among a hallucinatory spectacle: a boy with large red balloon, an illuminated yellow Chinese dragon, acrobats, juggling waiters and a stiltwalker. Indelible images of inconsolable isolation were created by Pluss, Eva Dessecker (costumes), Fabrice Kebour (lighting), Teresa Rotemberg (choreography) and Arian Andiel (video). “When I thought two times about this and I listened once again to the opera, I really thought it was what Puccini could have dreamed to imagine, because he’s speaking already about this in his music,” Pluss said. He estimated nearly 200 LED and neon lights were used. Set designer Étienne Pluss, taking inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey, ” created a doomed spaceship on a raked stage for the first two acts and a bleak planet for the final two - substituting ashes for snow in Act 3. Guth envisions the action unfolding across an unspecified future, perhaps 50 years from now or possibly 1,000. Puccini set the first and fourth acts in a Parisian garret, the second at the Latin Quarter’s Café Momus and the third at Paris’ Barrière d’Enfe, beginning the drama on Christmas Eve 1837 and ending it months later.

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