Part of the reason that Mimi coming back to life at the end is so weird and jarring was due to the original staging and THAT is what I think might have changed had Larson lived long enough to get real audience feedback about the show. I think he might have prevailed upon Michael Greif to make changes. In the original production it was pretty clear that Mimi is really most sincerely dead and, so, her resurrection made little sense other than to provide the show with a marginally happier ending.
But, if you look at the same scene in the film, it's staged in such a way that Mimi appears dead to the other characters, but the audience can see that she's still moving a bit. So, her "back to life" worked better because the audience knew that she'd not actually died. If you're going to have a character come back the way that Mimi does, you have to find a way to stage it so that the audience is aware that she hasn't expired, even if the characters are not. |
