Every couple of years the Royal Opera's 1974 staging of La Bohème hoves into view like the last tea clipper on the high seas - grand, stately, fussy, elaborate but still boasting an astonishing power to move. This is its 21st revival. With minutely detailed designs by the late Julia Trevelyan Oman, John Copley's production inhabits a world in which garrets were garrets not penthouses and poverty was the direct cause of hunger, disease and, for the coughing Mimi, death. The irony of this ultra-faithful staging is that to create Puccini's Bohemian world of impecunious pleasure and pain, a ton of money must be spent.

The stage is stuffed with low-life props and a cast of more than 100 all kitted out in costly old rags. Every star singer - each of the Three Tenors among them - has appeared since 1974 and they need astronomic fees to hang out in the Cafe Momus. We, too, have to spend our way through the two long intervals necessitated by complex scene changes. But it's worth every sou. This latest revival, conducted with spirit and some over-indulgence by Christian Badea, is not the best but there's much to delight in, especially Nicole Cabell's coquettish Musetta. This Cardiff Singer of the Year 2005 has comic pace as well as vocal poise. Her lover Marcello, a punchy Franco Vassallo, was an ideal match, with Roderick Williams and Matthew Rose excellent as the penniless students Schaunard and Colline and Donald Maxwell a witty Alcindoro.

Misfortune habitually strikes opening nights of Boheme, starting with the lampooned 1896 premiere. Here Italian tenor Roberto Aronica, as Rodolfo, had to cope with a painful leg injury. Struggling to be a romantic hero while hobbling on a stick isn't easy, yet still he scaled his golden, Pavarotti-esque high notes with ease in a touching performance.

The weakness was Chilean soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domas's Mimi. Intonation was insecure and although she can make a big sound, she doesn't elicit much pathos. But those of us susceptible to Puccini's masterpiece will have started sniffing around three minutes in to Act I, for this radical, scarcely understood work amounts to so much more than its final death scene. Go while you can. You won't see the likes of it again. Or not until October when it's back to mark Copley's 60 years with the Royal Opera.

Until 17 July. Information: 020 7304 4000.