Strictly ‘Boheme’
CATHERINE MARTIN and Baz Luhrmann wanted their new daughter to enter life particularly well equipped. So their choice of a name -- Lillian -- was anything but casual, the result of numerous intense sessions with baby books and multiple discussions.
“You have to give them things that will allow them to go into the world and find their own path,” says production and costume designer Martin, Luhrmann’s wife and close collaborator. “We liked the way Lillian sounded with Luhrmann. My favorite flower is the lily, and she would have a great little girl’s name. Lillian is also a name where if you decide to be something far less frivolous than your ridiculously eccentric bohemian parents, if you go to work for the United Nations or you decide to go into a convent, Lillian is kind of a serious name.”
And, Martin, 38, adds with an engaging smile, “Lilly rhymes with silly. We thought that was OK.”
Nothing is glossed over in the world of Bazmark Inq., Luhrmann and Martin’s hydra-headed entertainment company based in Sydney, which is mounting the director’s new Broadway production of Puccini’s “La Boheme” at the Ahmanson Theatre for seven weeks starting tonight. No detail is immune from heated scrutiny, names least of all.
“Baz says that once you name something you know it, because you had to consider what the name means,” says Martin, a petite blond dressed fashionably but quietly in long, flowing black garments by Australian designers.
“Baz” was a nasty nickname kids gave Luhrmann at school to make fun of his curly hair, so he claimed it as his own and turned it on its head.
“Bazmark” is a combination of his adopted name and Mark, his given middle name, as well as a play on the word trademark. And everyone in the world of Bazmark, including each chorus member of “La Boheme,” has a new-and-improved name. As for Martin, she’s simply “CM.”
When they married eight years ago, Martin offered to morph into Mrs. Luhrmann, but her new husband insisted she keep her given name.
“He was totally into me being my own person, which was something I never thought about because I think of myself as me whether I’m called potatohead or ratfink or Catherine Martin,” she says. “But it was very nice to see that he viewed my name being a description of my identity and being very important and particular to me.”
Supporting his ideas
At the moment, Martin is sitting in her dressing room backstage at the Ahmanson, and the closed door proves tempting to the hordes of company members who knock on it every few minutes to solicit her input on the smallest details. As the production and costume designer of Luhrmann’s intensely visual productions, Martin won two Oscars -- one for production design and a shared award for costume design (with “La Boheme” collaborator Angus Strathie) for the film “Moulin Rouge” (2001) -- and her eye is a critical component of his work.
Martin explains their collaborative process this way: “Baz is absolutely the director. He is the auteur of the ideas. An artist is someone who can create something out of nothing. I’m an applied artist. I apply myself to somebody else’s idea. So he’ll say, ‘This is what I want to make. What do you think?’ So it’s intensely collaborative. You’re asked to contribute continuously, but you are trying to serve that initial idea, that initial creative impulse.”
Lurhmann’s “La Boheme” was first commissioned in 1990 for the Australian Opera, which asked him to stage a new production that would lure young people who wouldn’t ordinarily be opera-goers. After extensive historical research, Luhrmann’s solution was to update the opera, a tragic love story written to take place in 1830s Paris and usually set in the 1880s. He wanted young people to be able to identify with the historical context, so he changed the setting to 1957, the last year tuberculosis -- which claims the heroine Mimi -- was a widespread problem. (It was mostly vanquished by the next year’s vaccines.) Her lover, Rodolfo, sports a “Grease”-era pompadour, and the original book’s device of a blown-out candle, which prompts Mimi to meet her neighbor Rodolfo by knocking on his door, is replaced by a power outage.
The look of the production was inspired by the black-and-white mid-century photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau, particularly the latter’s famous portrait of bohemian life, “Kiss by the Hotel de Ville” (1950). The set is the photo sprung to life, a noisy, black-and-white portrait of Parisian street life busy with signs printed on backlit bus-shelter vinyl. Towering over the stage is a giant sign that reads “L’Amour,” which also appeared in “Moulin Rouge”
“Both of us have always been obsessed with commercial signage,” says Martin, who met Luhrmann at Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art when they were students. “It’s that thing of something that’s ugly and garish that can also be glamorous and romantic. The idea of high and low culture is not our bag. Both of us feel that culture is culture, and that kitsch and things that people think are vulgar are beautiful in the right context. And we both have a great thing that taste is the enemy of art.”
As the opera opens, only the bohemians are drenched in color, and as time goes on and hard realities consume them, color drains from their clothes as well. The splash of color the bohemians bring to the stage prompted New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley to liken the production to “The Wizard of Oz”: “To experience the opening moments of Baz Luhrmann’s rapturous re-imagining of ‘La Boheme’ is to feel a bit like Judy Garland’s Dorothy when she stepped out of her drab Kansas farmhouse and into the land of Oz.”
Indeed, the comparison is no accident. “Both Baz and I saw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ as children and it changed our lives,” Martin says. “Going from black and white into color rocked our world.”
Martin’s father, a French professor at Sydney University, liked to take her to see the fanciful classic over and over, and despite the wizard’s entreaties to ignore the man behind the curtain, he took great pleasure in pulling it back.
“He’d explain to me how the color changed,” she says. “I was terribly scared of the witch and the way she melted, and he explained that there was a trap door in the floor and dry ice and she wasn’t really melting. My dad had a huge influence on my fascination with transformation and visual effects, the trick, the theatrical magic of it all.”
The curtain is literally pulled back in “La Boheme” as well. Eschewing high-tech machinery for changing scenes, the production instead makes use of a small army of crew members, much as theater did in 1957.
“Baz’s approach is very much about demystifying opera,” Martin says. “One of the things about making opera more emotionally accessible was to break down those conventions that you associate with traditional opera, such as the curtain coming down and hearing the scenery being moved around. Strangely, when you expose the mechanisms it involves the audience in a more direct way in the emotional life of the piece. You get to see how the magic is created, so in effect the magic is amplified.”
‘Boheme’ in the Big Apple
Luhrmann’s nearly $7 million, MTV-friendly production opened on Broadway in December 2002 with great fanfare, but it closed seven months later. Many of the critics were enthralled, although the production had its detractors, such as the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed, who called it “surprisingly flat -- an opera production that begins, and pretty much ends, with stagecraft.”
In the end, the New York production failed to recruit sufficient numbers of young audience members to keep it afloat. And Martin gives it mixed grades in assessing how well it achieved its ambitious goal. (The L.A. production, basically a transplant of the New York run, is even more ambitious in the sense that it adds a fourth cast of young leads to the three who rotated in New York because the roles are so demanding.)
Martin attributes the short run in part to factors -- such as the SARS outbreak and the war in Iraq -- that diminished the flow of tourists. “Certainly in the halcyon days of our houses, when we were filling all the time, we were getting a very broad group of people. But it’s a difficult concept to communicate to a wider audience, and I’m not making excuses, but once you have a dented house it’s hard to get back on there. So in reaching the broader expanse of audience, I think we scored 5 out of 10, and artistically I think we scored somewhere between 8and 10.”
Martin and Luhrmann are also in preproduction on a film about Alexander the Great, which is being produced by Dino de Laurentiis and Universal and filmed in Morocco and Sydney, Bazmark’s base and the couple’s second home after New York. That doesn’t even cover the gamut of various Bazmark project details, from marketing to CD covers, that require the couple’s attention.
But Martin isn’t complaining, not least because she’s married to a creative partner who likes to describe their relationship as a conversation that never ends. “We make the effort to argue in the best sense of the word, continue that stimulation which is talking about the widest range of subjects,” she says. Indeed, their marriage is the one thing that defies their scrutiny.
Says Luhrmann: “She’s my wife, I love her. I’m somebody who makes stories about love and I still can’t get to the bottom of it.”
He recently asked Martin to describe her perfect week. She began with a leisurely day that flowed from lunch with her best friend to a walk with the baby and dinner.
“We were laughing because it never actually runs like that,” she says. “I’m very time-poor, and now with a child you realize how important time is. So what’s my ambition for the future? To become a little more time-rich, to enjoy the fruits of my labor. But I don’t want to at all sound like I’m crying. I’m a very blessed person.”
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‘La Boheme’
Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.
When: Opens today, 4 p.m. Runs Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m.; Feb. 19, 26, March 4, 2 and 8 p.m.
Ends: March 7
Price: $30-$120
Contact: (213) 628-2772
