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Yet before we became Tinseltown, we had, count ‘em, three major opera houses downtown. At 1st and Main streets, on the site of the Caltrans building, sat the Grand Opera House. Mason Opera House was but two blocks away on Broadway. Around the corner from the Grand, Puccini’s “La Bohème” had its U.S. premiere in a 1897 touring production at the Los Angeles Theatre .

Giacomo Puccini, composer of “La Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Madama Butterfly,” died in 1924, leaving “Turandot,” his 13th opera, unfinished.

“There’s a passage where Musetta is raising a Champagne glass,” Costa-Jackson said, referring to their “La Bohème” in 2021.

Very early in the last century, her great-grandmother, then a teenager, worked up the courage to audition for a new opera called “La Bohème.”

That led to the role of Rodolfo in Puccini’s “La Bohème” at the Fujian Grand Theatre in China in 2017.