Although the trademark “L’amour” sign appears in “Moulin Rouge” and here as well, it’s a long way from the cheeky insurrection of his last movie. They’re no outrageous concepts here, no postmodern deconstructions of the form. Yet apart from a younger cast, the use of microphones and other sound equipment, and a reduced orchestra in the pit, Luhrmann is doing “La Boheme” straight up, much as it would be done in an opera house. Updated to 1957 Paris, sung in Italian with English subtitles and cast with a retinue of photogenic young performers, this “La Boheme” is intended to bring new audiences to this staple of the repertoire. “La Boheme” will be the first test of whether Luhrmann can resume the success of his earlier Australian stage career here, and it may affect the positioning of the live division of his production company, Bazmark Inc., which is developing new stage versions of his films “Strictly Ballroom” and “Moulin Rouge.” What’s more, if the experiment works, it would be a shot in the arm for opera, which could always use another vehicle for mainstream crossover. Now running at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco - where local reviewers have been overwhelmingly positive in their reception - “La Boheme” will open at the Broadway Theatre in New York in early December after starting previews slightly later than planned.
Luhrmann’s production of “La Boheme” is one of the most highly anticipated stage events of the Broadway season, as well as the Australian director’s first U.S. Most of all, there is the fact that the man in charge is film director Baz Luhrmann. There’s a video camera recording the process, for instance, and high-tech and lighting equipment around the room. Yet for all that is eternal in this scene of artistic endeavor, there are clues that make it clear that this is the 21st century. The bohemian life it celebrates is also a perennial: the passions, the jealousies, the overwrought poems, the overdue bills. Inside the studio, a dozen singers sit in a circle - reading sections of libretto, vocalizing phrases, laughing and chatting as they seek to uncover the deeper meanings in Giacomo Puccini’s “La Boheme.” The drizzly haze at the windows might well be a time warp, for they’re probing text and music in much the same way as have countless sopranos, tenors, baritones and basses before them for more than 100 years, since the opera premiered in 1896. Seen from inside, the misty downfall becomes a diaphanous shroud, blurring the Saturday afternoon scene unfolding below into the timeless surrealism of a French film. In Louis-Henri Murger’s Scenes of Bohemian Life,Īgentle summer rain washes the streets of downtown Manhattan, glancing off the windows of a fourth-floor rehearsal studio in a corner building on lower Broadway. ‘O my youth! It is you that is being buried.’
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