MARCH OPERA PRODUCTION : ADVANCE MAN BEGINS AUDITIONS FOR ‘BOHEME’

Orange County opera lovers won’t see Gian Carlo Menotti’s touring production of Puccini’s “La Boheme” until late next March when Opera Pacific stages the production at the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts.

But already this week Roman Terleckyj, Menotti’s assistant stage director, was in Costa Mesa to start solving technical problems and begin the casting of supers (non-singing members of the cast) and chorus members.

“This is one of the largest opera productions in the United States,” Terleckyj said in a recent interview.

“There are at least 130 people on the stage in Act II, including 48 supers, a chorus of about 60, 20 children and a band of nine, in addition to the four principal singers.

“Few theaters can handle it, but fortunately the Center is one of them.”

(Opera Pacific will present “La Boheme” at the Center on March 28 and April 1 and 4. John Mauceri will conduct. Cast principals include Diana Soviero as Mimi, Jerry Hadley as Rodolfo, Karen Huffstodt as Musetta and Timothy Noble as Marcello.

The production, which requires seven 45-foot trucks to transport the massive sets, was originally created for the Washington Opera and presented in 1980 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Terleckyj said. (Terleckyj is artistic administrator for the Washington company.)

“There are lots of built-in luxuries at the Kennedy Center, which make it difficult to export the production. But even there we had to lift off the top of the Cafe Momus, the set for Act II, because the main stage wasn’t high enough for us to roll the set on.

“Here, however, we’ll be able to store it on stage already constructed, though we might have to make small alterations in the size of the pieces. So things will be easier.

“And we’ll be able to make most of the set changes within the regular intermission periods.”

Terleckyj said he was “trying to solve as many technical problems as possible on paper first.”

“We’ve had meetings all morning and I don’t think there will be as many technical problems as I expected,” he said. “Of course, it’s a brand new facility, so the Center will be working out its own bugs even before we come in.”

For the production, Opera Pacific has budgeted $500,000, according to David DiChiera, general director of the company.

Terleckyj and DiChiera, founding general director of the Michigan Opera Theater, have worked together for a long time.

“I was one of David’s artistic children,” Terleckyj, 32, said. “I started studying with him as a music major at Oakland University (outside Detroit) when I was 15. David was chairman of the music department then.

“Then when he founded the Detroit company, I worked with him and sort of ran away with the circus.”

Terleckyj’s later credits include work at the Santa Fe, N.M., opera, Wolf Trap and Spoleto, Italy.

He has just returned from adapting Menotti’s staging of “La Boheme” for Luciano Pavarotti during the superstar’s recent tour to China.

“I started working with Menotti in Spoleto in 1979,” Terleckyj said. “Since then, I’ve done most of his operas.

“He’ll do a production, then I’ll take it over and restage it. I’m entrusted with whole thing since I know basically what he’s heading for.

“For this ‘La Boheme,’ I’ll put the show together for him and prepare most of staging. Then he’ll come in and give it his special enthusiasm.”

According to Terleckyj, the hallmark of a Menotti production is “realistic theater and naturalism.”

“There’s no gimmickry, and nothing is outrageous. He goes to the core of the music and gears into the emotion. He doesn’t want you to look at a production and think how clever the stage director is.

“Even though Act II is so large, we don’t use supers just to fill in the stage. We could use the chorus for that. The supers have lots of speciality bits,” Terleckyj said.

“And the rest of the opera is very small. Act IV, for instance, is like a flower that keeps on unfolding: The characters leave one by one, until the lovers Mimi and Rodolfo are left alone. Menotti just pulls these layers off it.

“Menotti believes that each artist is different and has so much to give that the point is not to block that. He begins by giving as much freedom to the artists as possible. It’s more a temperament, than a method,” he added.

“It’s just intended to be a good staging, with emphasis on believability and on a strong emotional content.”