The most highly-anticipated Broadway show of the year nearly didn’t happen.
Baz Luhrmann – the audacious film director who mixed Shakespeare with hip-hop in 1995’s “Romeo + Juliet” and shook up the movie musical with last year’s Oscar-nominated “Moulin Rouge” – almost gave up on his dream of bringing the Puccini opera “La Boheme” to Broadway.
Exhausted after the grueling world-wide promotional trek for “Moulin Rouge,” Luhmann says, “we actually decided to cancel ‘La Boheme’ and pull out.” But after the September 11 terrorist attacks, he and his long-time collaborator and wife, Catherine Martin – who bought a loft in SoHo this February – began reconsidering. A visit to Ground Zero cemented their resolve to go on with the show.
“Everyone was at the point of deciding whether to retreat or go on, and making something about the beautiful side of humanity through beautiful music suddenly went from being an interesting thing to do to – and I mean this in a not overly exultant way – but perhaps a useful thing to do.”
“La Boheme” promises to inject new life into a once-stagnant theater district that’s already been shaken up with other non-traditional fare, like Russell Simmon’s wildly popular “Def Poetry Jam” as well as the successful musical “Hairspray” (based on the John Waters movie).
“When we started, it seemed like our production was sticking out like a sore thumb,” says Luhrmann. “Thankfully, now we’re amongst other sore thumbs – in a really good way.”
And Luhrmann hopes to make the kids who gather outside “TRL” want to hike up a few blocks to see a 100-year-old Puccini opera.
“There’s a part of Broadway now that’s a lot about the bus tour,” says the 40-year-old Luhrmann, sipping from a strong cup of coffee in a suite at the Royalton Hotel.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’d love to think that we might be part of a more accessible but complicated meal that can be dissected afterward over a glass of wine – and might attract audiences that traditionally just aren’t going to Broadway.”
To that end, Luhrmann has rejiggered Puccini’s tragically romantic opera “La Boheme” into a splendiferous extravaganza, with costume and set design by Martin.
“La Boheme,” which begins a sold-out preview run here Nov. 29 at the Broadway Theater, will still be performed in Italian, with a full orchestra and chorus.
But the original 1830s Paris setting has been updated to the same city in 1957; the three casts – who will rotate through eight shows a week, so as to not damage their vocal cords – look like MTV veejays; and the translations (which are projected onto screens that frame the stage) have been modernized, with references to MG coupes and Marlon Brando.
Now that’s entertainment.
But Luhrmann says he’s not trying to be clever for the sake of being clever.
All of his changes to the original work are done with one goal in mind: “to bring ‘La Boheme’ to the audience for whom it was written – which is everybody,” says the director, who first mounted a production of “La Boheme” for the Australian Opera in 1990 to critical acclaim and commercial success.
“‘La Boheme’ was the television of its time, really. It was the ‘Sex and the City’ of the 1800s.
And “La Boheme” has much in common with Luhrmann’s last hit: “Moulin Rouge,” a gloriously doomed romance set against a Parisian backdrop dripping in blood-reds and midnight blues, with a love story told largely through music.
Luhrmann has admitted that before “Moulin Rouge” was released, he suffered near-panic attacks worrying about how such an unusual movie would be received.
(It went on to win two Oscars and was a hit not just with serious moviegoers but with teenagers, who were successfully courted through an MTV-ready soundtrack.)And the high-level anticipation is already building for Luhrmann’s latest audacious production: The recent month-long San Francisco run of “La Boheme” was sold-out, and sources say advance sales here are “very strong.”
But knowing that what he and Martin do is inherently difficult to communicate in soundbites, effective marketing has always been a priority.
Luhrmann’s directed his first-ever TV commercial to promote “La Boheme,” and he hired legendary photographer Douglas Kirkland to shoot his actors.
“It’s all about promoting our greatest asset, which is the young cast,” Martin says.
“And,” she adds, “being as clear as possible that it is in Italian, that it is an opera.”
But just as he was before the release of “Moulin Rouge,” Luhrmann is says he’s racked with anxiety.
“I wake up every morning and go, ‘We’re crazy. What are we doing? How did I get us all into this?'” he says.
“But I see any creative venture as an exercise in confronting fear.”So what would make Luhrmann consider his Broadway production of “La Boheme” an unqualified success?
“That’s easy,” he says immediately. “We were doing a documentary when we were putting the show together, and asked a 28-year-old guy if he would go.
“He said, ‘I’ve never seen an opera before, but I guess if it was by that guy who did ‘Moulin Rouge’ I might give it a go.’
“I felt an enormous sense of responsibility when I heard that,” he says.
“So my idea of success would be if he comes.””And,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, “the house filling long enough to pay back the money of risk – and then we’re done.”
WHO’S WHO IN THE CAST
Ever the perfectionist, Baz Luhrmann spent two years autioning 3,000 hopefuls from around the world to find 3 Mimis and 3 Rodolfos (who will rotate to save their voices). All of them are unknowns – but not for long. Meet the couples in the cast – who are divided into “red” “white” and “blue” pairs for no particluar reason:
“The Red Cast”
David Miller:
Hometown: Littleton, Colorado.
“He’s dangerous, tall – so handsome. He looks like someone out of N’Sync. ” – Lurhmann.
Ekaterina Solovyeva
Hometown: St. Petersburg, Russia.
Disappeared right before the show went into previews in San Francisco; upon return Luhrmann realized she was completely freaking out and hired a vocal coach to help her. Has said that the first time he heard her sing, “the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.”
“The White Cast”
Alfred Boe
Hometown: Lancashire, England.
Was discovered singing arias while working as a car mechanic. Says he’s “the only Rodolfo to wear jeans: Diesel, of course.”
Wei Huang
Hometown: Shanghai, China.
Has played Mimi three times before, but says Luhrmann made the whole cast “read through it for weeks before we ever sang. He said it helped us discover the ‘truth’ of each line.”
The “Blue” CastJesus Garcia
Hometown: League City, Texas.
“His lean, dark looks, flashing smile and caressing tone- close your eyes and he might be a young Pavoratti” – critic Steven Winn in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Lisa Hopkins
Hometown: Salt Lake City, Utah.
Says her vocal coach “knew I would get cast, because she said that I looked like that lady with the long red hair from “‘Moulin Rouge.'” – Ashley Cross
Raise the Red Curtain
Some people think he’s a pretentious blowhard, but to his fans he’s a visionary genius. Before he came to Broadway, Baz Luhrmann directed just three films that he later came to call “red curtain cinema” – which he defines as taking an old, simple, well-told story and piling on pop music, lavish costumes and singing moons to create a thoroughly overwhelming sense of cinematic exhilaration. And he’s been true to his word. (All three films are available on VHS and DVD as “The Red Curtain Trilogy.”) – Sara Stewart
Strictly Ballroom (1992)
Luhrmann’s favorite plotline: fated love between misfits. When our hero’s original ballroom-dance partner leaves him for daring to improvise, he finds a new partner in the ugly duckling Fran – who, of course, blossoms into a babe. They fall head over heels in love while the cheesy disco hit “Love Is in the Air” plays, but this is the kind of thing Luhrmann excels at – using corny, baldly sentimental music to express the feelings that his onscreen lovers are initially too timid to share. William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1996)
Teen idols Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio are the infamously doomed couple in Luhrmann’s bold updating, which moves the action to modern-day “Verona Beach” (Miami). Romeo rolls around town in a convertible while the Beastie Boys blast from the radio and chain-smokes to Radiohed; Mercutio is now a drag queen; and our lovers meet their tragic end due to a fatally slow messenger service called “Post Haste.” Oh, and Juliet blows her brains out with a semiautomatic. It all works.
Moulin Rouge (2001)
Luhrmann’s crowning glory, and his ode to the Bohemian ideals of “freedom, truth, beauty – and above all things love,” stars Ewan McGregor as a starving writer who woos Nicole Kidman’s courtesan by singing Bowie and U2 on top of a giant elephant while stars shower down and the man in the moon smiles. Then there are big problems, like tuberculosis. Luhrmann rapidly excelled at making visually arresting, heartbreakingly romantic movies, but this is unequivocally his best.