What he did for love

‘O my youth! It is you that is being buried.’

-- Rodolphe

In Louis-Henri Murger’s Scenes of Bohemian Life,

the basis of Puccini’s La Boheme

New York

Agentle 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. 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.

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. The bohemian life it celebrates is also a perennial: the passions, the jealousies, the overwrought poems, the overdue bills.

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. There’s a video camera recording the process, for instance, and high-tech and lighting equipment around the room. Most of all, there is the fact that the man in charge is film director Baz Luhrmann.

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. theatrical outing. 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. “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.

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. 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. They’re no outrageous concepts here, no postmodern deconstructions of the form. 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. And it’s sure to confound anyone looking for the flashy sensory overload of “Moulin Rouge,” with its coked-out take on 1899 Paris and grab-bag pop-rock soundtrack.

Although the $6.5-million-to-$7-million budget may seem small compared with the $50 million spent on “Moulin Rouge,” there are risks inherent in bringing Italian opera to Broadway. Most obviously, it risks not satisfying the demands of regular theater- or operagoers, let alone Luhrmann devotees. “There are quicker ways to make money and gain success, let me tell you,” the director says. “It’s not a clever career move particularly. We’re doing this for very personal reasons.”

It’s no mystery why the man who made “Moulin Rouge,” with its band of bohemians and a starving writer protagonist in an Orpheus-like plot, would be drawn to the garret dwellers of “La Boheme.” Puccini’s bohemians may even have helped inspire the characters in “Moulin Rouge,” since Luhrmann first staged the story of the poet Rodolfo’s love for the dying seamstress Mimi at the Australian Opera in 1990, before he made his mark in film.

Luhrmann sees his remounting of “La Boheme” as a rite of passage for himself and his wife and Bazmark partner, designer Catherine Martin. “I always said, after 40 you wouldn’t want to be doing ‘La Boheme,’ and I’m turning 40 just as we open,” says the director, who’s got the art of the schmooze down pat but doesn’t flaunt what reveals itself in conversation to be a keen intelligence. “The red curtain’s coming down on Act 1, and we’ve already begun on Act 2, but we have to deal with Act 1 and we’re dealing with it through ‘La Boheme.’

“When we did this 13 years ago, we ourselves were kind of kids -- 28 and 25,” says Luhrmann, his slender build and wired energy barely contained by the deep chair in which he’s seated. “And yes, if the piece is about saying goodbye to that bohemian, youthful time, then that’s what it’s about for us. We were deeply privileged and lucky to have had so much bohemia, so much youth, for so long. But I’m not lamenting it. I’m not wishing I was 25 again at all.”

Act 1:

A New York rehearsal room,

August

Musetta, the flirty girlfriend of Rodolfo’s buddy Marcello, is about to show up at the Cafe Momus, where the bohemians have gathered. At this point in the libretto, Luhrmann stops his cast for a bit of Socratic dialogue. Needling and cajoling the fledgling vocalists, he tries to get them to grasp this scene as clearly as if it were a story about meeting their own friends at the local Starbucks.

“What does the crowd say about her, the chorus?” he asks. Various voices chime in: “Look at her.” “What a get-up.”

“So she’s kind of the Madonna -- the early years -- of the Left Bank downtown?” he ventures. The singers nod in compliant, if vague, agreement, not that any of them are old enough to remember the Parisian Left Bank of the ‘50s.

He goads soprano Chloe Wright to come up with a pet name for her character Musetta’s wealthy escort, Alcindoro, played by William Youmans. Shyly she offers, “Sweetie?” The director isn’t satisfied.

She tries again: “Bunny-wunny?” Luhrmann ventures further, “And have they had bunny-wunny time yet, or is that something that’s going to happen?”

Not without effort, Wright and Youmans placate the director’s thirst for detail, if only for the moment. “As long as you have that clear in your head,” Luhrmann says. “You’ve done a little bit of nibbling, and that’s led to ‘bunny-wunny.’ But it has to be absolutely specific in your head.”

Luhrmann, who began his career as an actor, believes the key to his “La Boheme” lies in just such dramatic specificity, and that the acting has to be Method-real. In fact, rehearsal time is his chief innovation. Where a typical opera-house “La Boheme” would be assembled in a month, Luhrmann is spending more than twice that amount of time, much of it on text work.

“So how is it different than doing something at one of the big opera houses?” says musical director Constantine Kitsopoulos. “We have given ourselves the time to do it. It’s revolutionary in its simplicity is what it is.”

During the “La Boheme” casting process, which lasted nearly two years, the production team saw some 3,000 young opera singers, ultimately choosing an international ensemble, with triple casting in the leads, Mimi (Lisa Hopkins from the U.S., Wei Huang from China, Ekaterina Solovyeva from Russia) and Rodolfo (Alfred Boe from the U.K., Jesus Garcia and David Miller from the U.S.), and double casting for the secondary couple, Marcello (Eugene Brancoveanu from Germany and Ben Davis from the U.S.) and Musetta (Jessica Comeau from Canada and Chloe Wright from the U.K.).

A fresh-faced cast was central to the success of the 1990 Sydney outing, so they’ve stuck to that formula here. Revived in 1993 and filmed for PBS’ “Great Performances,” that broadcast is what interested veteran producer Emanuel Azenberg and the team of Jeffrey Seller and Kevin McCollum, whose first hit was Jonathan Larson’s “Rent,” itself an adaptation of “La Boheme.”

“Manny and the two boys, their vision was, what if we did ‘Rent’ downtown, and we’d bring this really funky ‘La Boheme’ on Broadway uptown?” Luhrmann recalls. The producers pursued the project for years. Finally, when Luhrmann completed “Moulin Rouge,” he agreed to take on the show. In addition to the three and Bazmark Live, other backers include Bob and Harvey Weinstein and Fox Searchlight Pictures.

At the time, the Bazmark duo may not have realized what they were getting into. “I can’t say that a lot of it hasn’t been very tough, but we’re sort of coming out the other side,” says Martin, widely known as C.M., a petite blond with an occasionally wicked sense of humor. While Luhrmann rehearses, his wife is overseeing the final phases of design and construction of the physical production down at Bazmark headquarters in SoHo. It’s an unimposing second-floor loft crowded with drafting tables near the front and rows of costume renderings tacked to the walls.

Winner of Academy Awards for “Moulin Rouge” art direction and co-costume design (with Angus Strathie), Martin is sitting next to a large double desk in a sparsely furnished back office. Clocks on the wall track the time in New York, L.A., London and Sydney, and a map of Manhattan attests to the fact that the city is still a relatively new second home for the designer and her husband. “It’s been difficult and fun,” she adds. “I suspect though, stupidly, that I thought it was going to be a lot easier than it’s been.”

Act 2:

Outside a theater in San Francisco,

September

The impudent clang of a cable car bell rings clarion on a mild fall afternoon, rising above the urban hubbub, as tourists and shoppers weave through Union Square. Nearby on Geary Street, the sidewalk in front of the Curran Theatre is filled with canvas containers, metal trunks and wooden crates, cryptic labels suggesting their contents, now safely loaded into the theater. “Fragile Neon.” “Hand Props.” “SR Alley Spares.”

Passersby note the trunks and crates and pause, attracted perhaps by the palpable sense of anticipation that radiates from a theater at such a moment -- when a show moves into the space for the first time. Their eyes are drawn to glamorous posters advertising “Baz Luhrmann’s production of Puccini’s ‘La Boheme’ ” in the two marquees on the building’s exterior, one featuring Boe and Huang and one with Miller and Solovyeva.

Inside, the second day of technical rehearsals is underway. Orchestra seats that on opening night will be occupied by the well-connected are now buried under large wooden tech tables, on which sit computers, keyboards and various other gadgets. Cast and crew are scattered about the house, while in the balcony more singers cool their heels alongside children’s chorus moms.

For the next two hours, Luhrmann will be onstage with a mic, calling and recalling cues and running and rerunning transitions, in an attempt to coordinate the timing of the movement of several set pieces with the revolving of the Cafe Momus. Eventually, when the major set pieces are arriving in the right places at the right moments and nothing is running into anything else, the actors will be asked to come and take their places in the cafe set. Then the whole sequence will begin again, still with Luhrmann himself calling the cues.

In all, nearly 10 days will be spent in technical rehearsals. Some of that time will be devoted to the microphones and sound equipment that aren’t normally part of opera. “In the Curran Theatre, we have an acoustic that is actually pretty good, so they’re not going to need to do much,” Kitsopoulos says. “But when you get to the Broadway Theatre, the walls are covered with fabric,” which means sound problems, including a lack of reverberation.

Back in May, the production hired some of the principals to test the Broadway’s acoustics. “David Miller got up and sang and said, ‘I’m not getting anything back from the hall,’ ” Kitsopoulos says. “On Broadway, the problem is theater availability. Sometimes it’s the luck of the draw. There are some other Broadway theaters I’ve worked in where the walls are covered by fabric, and you think, who thought of that? So it’s a challenge.”

The orchestra consists of 24 acoustic instruments and two keyboards. This is significantly less than would be used in an opera house -- where 70 or 80 instruments would be the norm, though smaller companies use fewer -- but not out of line for musical theater.

As is done in opera houses, Luhrmann has opted to stage “La Boheme” in its original language rather than using an existing translation or commissioning a new one. “We didn’t want to do it and change it to English,” he says, “because there’s no way the thing actually sounds the same.”

Act 3:

Inside the San Francisco theater,

October

Luhrmann enters, stage right, with the cuffs of his shirt dangling, a sartorial gesture that says “artist at work.” Speaking to the preview audience, he issues a caveat about the transition between Acts 1 and 2. “At some point, it’s going to be this incredibly fast, beautiful change,” he says. “But probably not tonight.” The house laughs appreciatively, lapping up his studied nonchalance.

Luhrmann is now in the home stretch of what has turned out to be a long route back to the stage. “What was shocking to me and to C.M. is how we were becoming encoded into the very rarefied support systems that belong to making high-profile movies,” he says. “So from Day One, C.M. and I had to roll our sleeves up and get out of the trailer.

“I’m going up and down in elevators, waiting with kids who are doing other musicals,” he continues. “But I’m suddenly realizing, why is the elevator going so slowly? And what you realize is that in a $100-million investment, there’s a mechanism that’ll go whoosh, and you go in, whoosh, you go out. So the shock is it’s been bloody hard to just get back to the forced labor that the theater requires.”

Looking back, the idea of reviving “La Boheme” seemed to make sense as a first venture in New York theater. Luhrmann’s next film project is the Dino De Laurentiis historical epic about Alexander the Great for 20th Century Fox and Universal. “ ‘Boheme’ was a perfect medium to kind of learn the ropes of Broadway,” Martin says. “We’d done it before, so it’d be easier.” The choice certainly wasn’t a matter of youthful folly. Yet it has become a moment of transition and reflection for Luhrmann and Martin, a looking glass in which to view their own past. Whether it also proves pragmatic remains to be seen.

“We probably might be looking in six months’ time, going, ‘That was a silly idea,’ ” Luhrmann says. “Fair enough. However, anything we make, we make because we want to make it, because it relates specifically to my life. We don’t do things because we need to get a few extra bucks off ‘La Boheme.’ We’re doing it because it’s our life choice.”

The diversity of Luhrmann

Theater

“Strictly Ballroom” (1988)

Opera

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1993)

“La Boheme” (1990)

“Lake Lost” (1988)

Film

“Moulin Rouge” (2001)

“Romeo + Juliet” (1996)

“Strictly Ballroom” (1992)