Opera goes neon

If no opera can be over until the fat lady sings, "La Bohème" on Broadway may run for a long, long time.

Australian director Baz Luhrmann is putting a cast of trim, talented 20-something singers on stage in a century-old opera sung in Italian, convinced that audiences more attuned to the pop sound of "The Lion King" and "Cabaret" will want to hear what he's calling "the greatest love story ever sung." Mr. Luhrmann says his mission is to "bring this work back to the audience it was meant for - and that's everybody. And where are you going to find everybody as an audience in the theater today? Broadway."

Based on the favorable reaction to a preview run in San Francisco, it looks as if it just may work, sweeping in young theatergoers eager to see what the hip director of the musical "Moulin Rouge" can do with another story set among young lovers in Paris.

"The Broadway smarties have said to us, 'You will fail,' " says Jeffrey Sellers, a coproducer of the show. If they succeed, more opera on Broadway could follow. "If this works, you'll see the announcement of three revivals of operas in the next six months," says his partner, Kevin McCollum. "And remember, if you pick the right ones, you don't have to pay royalties!"

"It's to be highly commended," says Jonathan Pell, artistic director of the Dallas Opera, who went to "La Bohème" in San Francisco with a highly skeptical attitude and came away impressed. "He has put on the stage Puccini's 'La Bohème.' He's just opened it up to a new audience."

The performance Mr. Pell saw, he says, "was filled with young people who came to it, I suspect, thinking that they were somehow going to see Nicole Kidman as Musetta.... At the end, they were cheering like it was a rock concert." As part of the effort to continue to attract a younger crowd of nontheater (or opera) goers, seats in the first two rows of "La Bohème" on Broadway will cost just $20, sold each day two hours before curtain.

Puccini, who wrote the opera in 1896, set the story of four young bohemians living together in Parisian garrets in the 1830s. Luhrmann has moved the story to 1957 - not, he says, to change it, but to get closer to the emotional truth of the original.

"I'm against 'Hamlet in Hawaii,' which is updating for the sake of trying to be groovy, trying to be swingin'," Luhrmann says. The decision "came from our mission, which was, 'How do you make it as much like the experience the audiences had in the 1890s?' "

While today's audiences might have trouble relating to the clothing and lifestyles of the 1830s, he felt that 1957 would be accessible, while still being a close social and economic match to the earlier period. "Any updating shouldn't be about adding extra. It should be about revealing what is there," he says.

For most opera productions, principal singers might spend two or three weeks together in rehearsal. This cast, which includes three different couples in the romantic leads of Rodolfo and Mimi, began rehearsals more than three months ago.

Luhrmann gave the singers a huge stack of background material to read on the opera, says David Miller, who'll play Rodolfo on opening night Sunday. The atmosphere at rehearsals, says Eugene Brancoveanu, one of two singers who play Marcello, was "very supportive. [Luhrmann] was able to trigger something ... that makes you go deep, deep into the character."

The singers were given an English translation of the Italian text and then had to put that into their own words. They spent about two weeks rehearsing the opera as a play in English, using their own words, before singing a note. Later, in rehearsals, Luhrmann would clap his hands, which meant the singers must switch from English to Italian or vice versa, to make sure they knew what they were singing about.

The singers' own translations became the basis for the loose, colloquial English translation that audiences will see.

In this version of opera, "It's not enough anymore to just stand on stage and sing. You have to be able to act," says Alfred Boe, a tenor from northern England who'll rotate in the role of Rodolfo. Getting to the meaning of the words, he says, matches the "emotion in the music that Puccini wrote that makes the hair stand up on the back of your head."

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