Yo, daddy-o, what’s that cat spelling out?

“Dude, where’s my supertitle?”

OK, “dude” isn’t bandied about in “La Boheme,” Puccini’s 19th century opera of doomed love. But the hip expressions “cat” and “daddy-o” do pop up in Baz Luhrmann’s opulent staging of the Italian tear-jerker at the Ahmanson Theatre through March 7.

And while the French word l’amour may be the name of the game, if you don’t understand Italian, you probably won’t be smitten. Thanks, then, for supertitles, written translations of dialogue and lyrics of a foreign-language performance projected on screens around a theater. And if Luhrmann, whose Oscar-winning film “Moulin Rouge” helped spark a movie musical renaissance, doesn’t quite reinvent opera, he’s certainly jacking up the pizazz factor with his take on the opus that snagged two Tony Awards after opening on Broadway in 2002.

His take includes updating the story to 1950s Paris and making use of 811 cues for supertitles. The translations, written by Luhrmann, David Crooks and Jerry Ruiz from Roberto Benabib’s original draft, have changed since Luhrmann’s “Boheme” bowed in an earlier incarnation in Sydney, Australia, 14 years ago.

“The challenge,” explains Ruiz, who’s been with this “Boheme” since its pre-Broadway San Francisco run and is also assistant resident director/assistant stage manager, “is translating something in Italian, written to be sung, that was written over 100 years ago. Creating the supertitles was an arduous process.”

The original libretto was written by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, after Henri Murger’s novel “Scenes de la vie de Boheme.”

To research the 1990 show, Luhrmann went to Italy with a translator who pored over the text. “What he discovered,” Ruiz says, “was that ‘Boheme’ was relevant with topical references. It was the ‘Sex and the City’ of its day. Baz wanted to ensure the supertitles were as immediate to the audience as the actual text was back then.”

Written in four fonts and displayed on six different screens around the theater, colloquialized words such as “ka-pow” vie for attention with more traditional lovey dovey fare. Ruiz points out that while most of the supertitles are in standard helvetica, an italic font is used for comic themes and cursive script is employed for romance.

“There’s also a split focus -- one couple is having an argument, while another is getting back together, and a different font is used for each to help the audience follow the action. The slang,” Ruiz adds, “was used to lock into how bohemian hipsters would have talked.”

Ruiz, who reads music and can follow the score, sits in a booth at the rear of the mezzanine, calling cues to Pam Monroe, supertitles operator.

“You want the supertitle to come in exactly as the actor begins to sing the lines, so it’s clear what this person is singing. If you drop the ball, it’s hard to get it back in the air. But now that we’ve been doing it a while, it’s a well-oiled machine.”

Like wow, man.

-- Victoria Looseleaf