A timeless love story.

Byline: FRED CRAFTS The Register-Guard

TALK ABOUT hitting the jackpot. As Mimi in the Eugene Opera's production of Giacomo Puccini's "La Boheme," Eugene soprano Carol Ann Manzi gets to sing her favorite role in her favorite opera.

"I love singing every phrase of the last act," says Manzi, sitting in an oversized stuffed chair in the living room of the apartment she shares with her husband, Eugene Opera artistic director/conductor Robert Ashens. "It's just spectacular."

The fourth, and final, act is a renowned tearjerker in which Mimi, a cheerful young seamstress who has just fallen in love with the poet Rudolfo, loses her battle with tuberculosis.

For Manzi, the highlight comes when Mimi sings (``Sono andati?'') `Rudolfo. Have they all left, because there's something I've been waiting to tell you. It's that my love for you is as deep as the ocean and as wide as the sea.' It wrenches me every time I sing it. It's just so beautifully written. It's just such an extraordinary expression of her love."

It's also one of the reasons Opera America calls "La Boheme" the world's most-performed opera. It's been the source for the highly acclaimed rock musical "Rent" and now is a widely ballyhooed new Broadway production.

` `La Boheme' has proven itself to be not only a piece of great art but a piece the world needs to keep hearing - especially in these times in which we are living - because it's so human," Manzi says. "Everyone can identify with the characters in this opera. The music reaches right into your heartstrings and tugs on them. It's a great expression of the preciousness and value of life, and of human love - really great, unselfish love."

Love, Manzi says, is the "feeling that I hope people will take away with them when they leave the theater. They may not remember particulars, but they will remember the `feeling' they have experienced and are left with."

Which is why Manzi - whose voice has been described by Opera News as "creamy, secure and multifaceted" - loves playing Mimi. It is, she says, "a perfect role and vehicle for me. I want myself to be about love and warmth and compassion and giving."

Mimi is among a group of young people - including the painter Marcello, the philosopher Coline, the musician Schunard and the poet Rudolfo - living in an apartment house in Paris in the winter of 1830. They are broke, hungry and cold.

Into their studio ventures Lucia, whom everyone calls Mimi. She does embroidery - lilies and roses, the symbols of love and springtime - to earn a living. She eats her meals alone, rarely goes to church but prays often, and holes up in her attic room.

"Mimi is a really hard character to portray convincingly because she's so sincere and so relatively simple," Manzi says. "She really is about gentleness and love. That has to come across immediately."

Manzi and her opera character are alike in many ways.

"I especially identify with the way she notices the extreme beauty and blessings in the little things," Manzi says. "The whole climax of her first aria (`Mi chaimano Mimi') is that when she sees the sun coming in the window, the first sunshine of the spring is hers. I really identify with that because I tend to do the same things on a daily basis. I wake up and I look out the window, and I marvel at all the little changes that happen outside the window. I'm constantly rejoicing and giving great thanks for the little beautiful blessings. If you're not a person who identifies with that, it's really hard to pull her off convincingly."

Manzi plays Mimi very low-key.

"Everything about her has to be an absence of histrionics," she says. "It's very difficult to do most of the acting with your voice and not with lots of extraneous movement. Sometimes you feel like you're up on this big stage being this character and you wonder if you are doing enough. In the situation, you definitely have to say to yourself, `Less is more.'

"The key to singing Mimi well is, you've got to have a good sense of legato singing. You really have to be able sing lush, long lines, and your voice has to be able to soar on those long lines. That's one of the things that lends itself well to my voice," Manzi says.

A graduate of Yale School of Music, Manzi, 38, has sung the role many times at Sarasota Opera and Greensboro Opera, and will sing it in 2004 with Opera Carolina. She also has sung the companion role of Musetta, as well as roles in other operas, at Opera Carolina, Opera Santa Barbara, Connecticut Opera, Toledo Opera and Opera Maine. Most of those engagements have come in the past four years, or since she overcame breast cancer.

Manzi pauses to consider the journey she has taken the past four years: "I sometimes wonder if this illness happened to me to make a better artist. I have faced my mortality square in the face. I went through many months thinking, `I don't know if I'm going to be alive next year,' so it gives me an edge in terms of portraying these death scenes.

"For example, there's this moment in the last act in which Rudolfo starts to cry and she says, `Why are you crying?' She says, `I'm feeling so much better.' That's like half-a-minute before she dies. I can remember that when I was going through the chemotherapy, I was constantly telling everyone, `I know I might look sick, but I'm really fine. I'm doing great.' A person in that situation is constantly trying to rescue everyone else and make them feel better, because you care about people so much you don't want them to suffer on your behalf. I identify with a lot of the lines that she says in the last act."

Manzi was diagnosed with cancer in October 1998. She had a mastectomy and was just about to undergo chemotherapy when she was offered the role of Magda in "La Rondine" at Sarasota Opera.

She would have turned it down, she says, had her husband not insisted that she go because he considered the role "perfect for her voice." Since then, Manzi has made many motivational speeches, sharing with women how they "can thrive - not just survive - in the face of any situation."

She sang in April at the Creative Center for Women with Cancer in New York City and in May at the Susan G. Komen Foundation's Sing for the Cure concert in Charlotte, N.C.

In Eugene, she has sung with Eugene Opera (``La Traviata''), in the Eugene Symphony/Willamette Repertory Theatre production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and in numerous church productions.

When she is not singing, she serves as a lay Eucharistic minister through St. Mary's Episcopal Church. She often sings at church services, and she takes the sacrament to Episcopalian patients at Sacred Heart Medical Center on Wednesdays.

She also serves in the church's soup kitchen on Saturdays, takes part in a Volunteers in Medicine Clinic on Fridays and frequently works as a Reach to Recovery volunteer with the American Cancer Society.

She is also the vice-president of Hopeline, a Eugene-based women's cancer center, and regional coordinator for the Young Survivors Coalition. She will speak to the Conference of Mammographers in Seattle next year and will sing the national anthem at the University of Oregon men's basketball game on Thursday.

But all that volunteering is beginning to clash with her singing career, and she finds herself at a crossroads.

"I'm starting to find that I need to maybe rethink some of this and see exactly where my talents and strengths could best be used," Manzi says.

"When I'm singing, I see myself just singing because I have this huge incredible passion to do this. I think I'm finally seeing what it is that I do best - and one of those things is Puccini. That seems to be what people really respond to, on the national circuit, that is. But I think that I always have to have my hand in some form of ministry."

Music, she points out, is a form of ministry.

"I continually seek ways in which I can use my singing to greater and greater purposes."

Thus, as Manzi is about to once again portray Mimi, she is counting her blessings. Moving to Eugene two years ago from Connecticut is one of the big ones. ("It's calmer here. We're calmer here.")

"I feel like we've both taken steps forward professionally, but we've also taken steps back to look at the bigger picture, take a deep breath and smell the roses," she says. "I don't feel like I have to be doing this or I have to be doing that. I think things are happening the way they're supposed to be happening. I feel very calm about all of it. I'm where I'm supposed to be."

Arts reporter Fred Crafts can be reached by phone at 338-2575 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

"LA BOHEME"

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and 2:30 p.m. Jan. 5

WHERE: Silva Hall, Hult Center, Seventh and Willamette streets

HOW MUCH: $10 to $65, at the Hult Center box office (682-5000)

PARTY: A New Year's Eve celebration with a DJ and singing by opera cast members will be held in the Hult Center's Studio One after Tuesday's performance. Tickets are $30 each and are available at the Hult Center box office.

CAPTION(S):

"Everyone can identify with the characters in this opera. The music reaches right into your heartstrings," Carol Ann Manzi says of ``La Boheme.'' Mark Duffin has the lead male role, as the poet Rudolfo, in Eugene Opera's production. Marla Kavanaugh Kostantinos sings the part of Musetta. Paul Sahuc (in the part of the painter Marcello) casts a scowl toward Musetta.