Within this lightly Brechtian frame, the acting is more or less naturalistic, with a few cartoonish touches. In the first act, when she comes upstairs to light her candle, the already ill Mimì faints dead away; rather than being concerned, Rodolfo is almost amused, tapping her with his foot. In the second act, at Café Momus, the hellcat Musetta doesn’t just flirt with the crowd but pulls off her underwear and throws it; she and her estranged lover, Marcello, boisterously kiss the same woman. (Suffice to say a bit of casual bisexuality isn’t on offer in most “Bohème” productions.)

The staging manages to infuse the old war horse with a genuine mood — a real, if occasionally exaggerated, melancholy — without alienating those looking for hoop skirts and a parade at the end of Act 2. But in the end, it’s more or less just a shift of the stove.

The coming Paris production, the details of which are being closely kept, will not be nearly so indulgent of audience expectations. “The second the curtain opens, you have a fist in your face,” Mr. Guth, the director, said in a phone interview.

Mr. Guth, acclaimed for stylized, even surreal productions that nevertheless remain moored to reality, hadn’t thought his style was a good match for Puccini, and he didn’t like the clichés about artists endemic to “Bohème” stagings. But listening to the music alone and brainstorming conceptual approaches brought him to the 1851 Henri Murger book on which the libretto is based.