There are few operas as relatable as La Bohème, Puccini’s beloved tale of young, broke city hipsters living for themselves and each other, and for love or something like it in newly bourgeoisie 19th-century Paris. Anyone raised on Rent, the opera’s rock musical adaptation, or for that matter the sitcom Friends will recognize in La Bohème an ensemble story we tell over and over. 

Everything from West Side Story to MTV’s The Real World, to the Dandy Warhols’ sarcastic 2000 anti-ode Bohemian Like You celebrates the combined spark of youthful camaraderie and urban modernity that La Bohème first depicted as an ephemeral pleasure — a bubble that inevitably bursts.