La Boheme

 Posted on May 2, 2024  |  11 minutes  |  2153 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Baz Luhrmann's utterly enchanting Broadway production of "La Boheme" is just the thing to take the sting out of the winter chill. This unabashedly exuberant but intricately wrought staging of Puccini's masterpiece adds a cinematic immediacy to the emotional intensity that only opera can afford.

Baz Luhrmann’s utterly enchanting Broadway production of “La Boheme” is just the thing to take the sting out of the winter chill. This unabashedly exuberant but intricately wrought staging of Puccini’s masterpiece adds a cinematic immediacy to the emotional intensity that only opera can afford. It succeeds spectacularly in its ultimate goal — to put the pop back in opera — and a lusty critical reception might just help turn a century-old operatic warhorse into Broadway’s next hot ticket.

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Last year, the enterprising Aussie put the box office bounce back in the movie musical with “Moulin Rouge,” and this foray into opera offers further proof of his genius at re-animating entertainment genres popularly thought to be past their prime. In the process, Luhrmann is bringing the pleasures of the art form to people whose acquaintance with it may not extend beyond a long-ago schoolday trek to the nearest opera house for what may have felt like endless hours of caterwauling in an unknown tongue.

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For such audiences, at which this eminently accessible production is squarely aimed, Luhrmann’s “La Boheme” will be a revelation. For veteran operagoers, the pleasures may be more mixed: The reduced size of the orchestra undeniably blunts the impact of musical climaxes, and the young and uniformly attractive singers in the central roles have voices of variable size and sophistication (three casts alternate in the show’s Broadway-standard eight performances a week). But there is a special pleasure in seeing the opera in a theater that’s small by opera-house standards, and even aficionados will delight in the giddy inventions of the stagecraft on display here.

The production has been gorgeously designed by Luhrmann’s close collaborator Catherine Martin (also his wife) and lit with endless artistry by Nigel Levings. It constantly flickers with theatrical life. The sets, representing a storybook black-and-white Paris as seen through the lens of Robert Doisneau or Brassai, are themselves often in motion, lending freedom to the staging and an extra jolt of energy to the narrative. The opera unfolds with the fluidity of a crisply edited movie.

Stagehands remain onstage to effect scene changes — spinning the platform on which Rodolfo’s humble garret sits so he and Mimi can confess their love in front of a massive electric sign outside the window advertising “L’Amour,” the opera’s central theme, with cheeky, disarming bluntness. They hold orange pin spots to simulate the flickering of a fire in the grate, or scatter snowflakes in front of a fan whenever one of the scrappy youngsters breezes in or out of the garret.

The effect is anything but distracting: Luhrmann has the gift, rare in any genre, of pointing up the artifice in art without detracting from its emotional impact. Indeed, the visibility of the stagecraft here serves to underscore the immediacy of the experience, to remind us the thrill of great theater is that it is not mass-produced: Like love and loss, it takes place in a particular time and place, to particular human beings. Its joys are as fleeting as all others, and all the more precious for that.

The loves and losses depicted in “La Boheme” derive from the on-again, off-again romances of poet Rodolfo and the seamstress Mimi, she of tiny-frozen-hand fame, as well as Rodolfo’s painter pal Marcello and the flirtatious Musetta, a handle forever associated with that infectious waltz. In that soaring duet, Mimi and Rodolfo pledge their love within minutes of meeting each other, and here, too, the design lends gentle truth to this surprisingly quick development by presenting the garret as a small boat floating in isolation among the Paris rooftops, an intimate bateau-mouche built for two.

They descend to share their rapture with Rodolfo’s rowdy gang of bohemians at the Cafe Momus, and Martin and Luhrmann effect a terrific coup de theatre when this street scene, teeming with comic business, blazes into life as a riot of white and red neon signs flash on in an instant. Luhrmann is not, as anyone who has seen his movies knows, a graduate of the less-is-more school of aesthetics. Here and in some of the rambunctious comic interplay among Rodolfo and Marcello and their boho pals Schaunard and Colline, he pushes things extravagantly near excess.

With the entire stage, and the lavishly decorated boxes in the auditorium, too, full to bursting with comical Parisian types — Carmelite nuns, sailors, cops, prostitutes for every taste, even a dwarf — Zeffirellian overkill is just around the corner. But Luhrmann’s skill with actors apparently extends to drawing out vivid turns in even the smallest roles — everyone onstage seems to have an authentic purpose for being there, however small, with the result that the ebullience feels natural, not manufactured. And he knows how to scale down when needed: The third-act duet in which Mimi and Rodolfo threaten to part and then reaffirm their love is staged with utter simplicity, drifting snow the only accompaniment to their tender give-and-take.

Theatrical exuberance is just one of the devices Luhrmann has used to ensure audiences are never put at a distance by listening to a foreign language (the opera is sung in the original Italian). The story has been updated to 1957, so that the visual vocabulary needs no translation. The costumes and hairstyles have a familiar chic: The leather coats and jackets sported by the boys, and the Dioresque dresses Musetta uses for flouncing, might have been taken off the rack at an upscale vintage store in Soho. The lyric translations that can be read on as many as four screens surrounding the stage are looser even than the free-spirited Musetta: They’re dotted with goofy period argot, so that Schaunard talks of a “rich old English cat” who wants “a lesson in ‘bebop,’ you dig?” Stuffed with jokes both witty and corny, they are goosed by the use of a variety of typefaces, too.

Yes, the effect can be distracting, and those smug operagoers who get outraged when audiences at the Met laugh in time with the supertitles, and not when the line in question is actually sung, will be apoplectic. But let ’em clutch the pearls: The benefits of an adaptation that speaks to us in a voice we like to hear outweigh any losses in strict accuracy. Literal translations would be more hindrance than help to Luhrmann’s populist goal: Who would fall in love with a guy whose pickup line is, “Your tiny hand is frozen”?

More disappointing is the small size of the orchestra, which sounds distinctly anemic when it is left alone to punch up a climax or introduce a scene with a powerful burst of music. For those used to hearing the score in an opera house, the weakened sound cannot help but detract from the emotional impact of the tragic finale, for instance.

But by way of compensation, there is the unquestionable dramatic vibrancy that results from singers being given an ample rehearsal period as well as a long run to work their way into the heart of their characters. Luhrmann’s performers largely — and blessedly — avoid the generic gestures opera singers often employ to make an impact in a cavernous opera house. In the relative intimacy of a Broadway theater, subtle effects — the play of emotion on Mimi’s face when she overhears Rodolfo speaking of her illness, the stricken stillness that presides in the garret when Mimi succumbs — can be deeply affecting.

With three Mimis and three Rodolfos, and a pair each of Musettas and Marcellos, some performances inevitably will be more affecting than others, or more musically accomplished, but virtually all the fresh-faced performers here are fine actors and respectable singers. David Miller, a promising American tenor, and Ekaterina Solovyeva, a Russian soprano with an impressive, rich tone, made for an ardent pairing, with Solovyeva particularly touching in her last moments. Jesus Garcia, who uses his finely focused tenor with delicacy, and Lisa Hopkins, whose lyric soprano has a willowy quality just right for this gentle soul, pleased me with their gentle rapport. Alfred
Boe and Wei Huang were a bit less affecting at the performance I caught.

Among the supporting casts, baritone Eugene Brancoveanu was a wonderfully lusty and touching Marcello, Jessica Comeau the more musically accomplished Musetta. Both Daniel Okulitch and Daniel Webb are superb as the high-spirited Schaunard and Colline, respectively, whizzing around the garret like battery-powered bohemian action figures, singing with vigor and charm. The subduing of their jubilance when a desperate Mimi arrives in the final scene adds to the painful poignance of the opera’s last moments.

Giacomo Puccini, by the way, deserves a bit of credit, too, as do his librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. “La Boheme” is a virtually perfect opera, dramatically taut where others are pocked with longueurs; populated by appealing human characters, not off-the-rack operatic types; rich in glorious, uncomplicated music that magically translates the joys and tribulations of youth into sound. The opera has found a perfect mate in Baz Luhrmann, an artist who seems destined for an enduring career ranging across who-knows-how-many forms of media, but one who, I suspect, will forever remain a starry-eyed youth at heart.

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La Boheme

Broadway Theater; 1,697 seats; $95 top

  • Production: A Jeffrey Seller, Kevin McCollum, Emanuel Azenberg, Bazmark Live, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Korea Pictures/Doyun Seol, J. Sine/I. Pittelman/S. Nederlander and Fox Searchlight Pictures presentation of the opera in two acts with music by Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. Directed by Baz Luhrmann.
  • Crew: Music director and principal conductor, Constantine Kitsopoulos. Sets, Catherine Martin; costumes, Martin, Angus Strathie; lighting, Nigel Levings; sound, Acme Sound Partners; orchestrations, Nicholas Kitsopoulos; music coordinator, John Miller; production stage manager, Frank Hartenstein. Opened Dec. 8, 2002. Reviewed Dec. 4, 5, 6. Running time: 2 hours, 5 min.
  • Cast: Marcello - Eugene Brancoveanu, Ben Davis Rodolfo - Alfred Boe, Jesus Garcia, David Miller Colline - Daniel Webb Schaunard - Daniel Okulitch Benoit - Adam Grupper Mimi - Lisa Hopkins, Wei Huang, Ekaterina Solovyeva Parpignol - Dan Entrekin Alcindoro - William Youmans Musetta - Jessica Comeau, Chloe Wright Customs Officer - Sean Cooper Sergeant - Graham Fandrei

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