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The Buzz about Baz
The buzz on Broadway is all about Baz
ABC News Online Australia
6 December 2002

Australian film director Baz Luhrmann, best known for visually dazzling movies such as Moulin Rouge and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, brings his splashy stage version of Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème to Broadway this month, one of the most anticipated events of the theatre season.

But is Broadway, home to dramas and musicals but not full-length, 19th century Italian opera, ready for Luhrmann?

Even he isn't sure. But he thinks his revved-up production featuring a cast of 20-something singers and an updated setting will appeal to a mass audience unfamiliar with opera.

"Ultimately, it was written for audiences from all kinds of backgrounds," he said of Puccini's ode to bohemian life in Paris. "That's where it began."

La Bohème was well-received during an October run in San Francisco. Previews in New York began November 29, with opening night slated for Sunday.

"One thing we learned from San Francisco is audiences who have never been to the opera before are coming out saying, 'That's so clear. I know what's going on and I felt for the characters,'" Luhrmann said, speaking at a media gathering in New York.

The opera, a reprise of a production Luhrmann first staged in 1990 at the Sydney Opera House, is sung in the original Italian. Luhrmann brought together singers from around the world, including China and Russia, in what he has called "the young Olympics of opera."

The production's faithfulness to Puccini's music is a big difference from another Broadway production inspired by La Bohème, the long-running Rent.

The producers of Rent, a rock opera set in contemporary New York, also are backing Luhrmann's Broadway debut.

It's also a departure from Luhrmann's last musical outing, the movie Moulin Rouge, which was set in a 19th century dance hall but had a modern pop soundtrack.

But Luhrmann and his wife and collaborator, Academy Award-winning art director Catherine Martin, take other liberties with La Bohème. The setting is still Paris, but instead of the 1830s it is now a film noir-like 1950s. Luhrmann and Martin updated the setting because they wanted to make it more accessible to modern audiences.

The set also is more open than the traditional opera set.

"Everything is exposed," Martin said. "Baz basically subverts the convention of opera, which is that there is a big red curtain and behind a big red curtain all these secret things happen."

Luhrmann is also cutting out what he calls some of the "artifice" of traditional opera by casting younger singers in the roles of the starving artists, scrapping the formal bows opera singers typically take throughout a performance and speeding up the dialogue.

"With our cinema we've been exploring the theatrical cinematic language of the '30s and the '40s," he said. "With opera in a way we've been naturalising it more ... we are trying to make it more grounded, slightly more believable."

He's also courting a younger audience. On the show's web site, ticket buyers are told "you can dress any way you want" - perhaps a dig at the well-dressed crowd at the Metropolitan Opera a few blocks away.

Staging an opera on Broadway has presented many challenges, such as how to keep up a gruelling schedule of night-after-night performances. The roles of doomed lovers Mimi and Rodolfo are performed by three rotating pairs of singers, so that they do not overuse their voices.

Luhrmann has stressed acting and character development, something often missing from opera, his young cast members say. During rehearsals, he asked the singers to write their parts in their own words, then act out the scenes in English so they could better understand the characters.

"It was all about helping you get down and dig into the truth of any given moment," said 25-year-old Jesus Garcia, one of the rotating Rodolfos.

Bringing the estimated $AU11.6 million production to Broadway took years, mainly because Luhrmann was busy with various film projects. He says he and Martin originally conceptualised the opera when they were "25-year-old bohemians" themselves, but he thinks the new version reflects their own maturity as artists.

"Now, turning 40, I guess we look upon it as ... sort of a farewell kiss to our own creative bohemian," he said.

He's preparing to move on to his next project, a film version of Alexander the Great. "I always wanted to do this musical work and then epic works," he said.

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What's Opera, Doc?
La Bohème comes to Broadway not as a knock-off, but in its glorious original form
By: Michael Portantiere, Theatre Mania
4 December 2002
(Images featured with this article can be found on the Miscellaneous Images page.)

What a concept! Rather than take the story of a great opera, throw out the score, write pop songs to replace it, and stage the thing as a Broadway musical, why not simply present the original work on the Great White Way? Opera fans were probably as delighted as they were surprised when they first heard that Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème (1896) was coming to Broadway with its melodies intact, not to mention its Italian libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica.

The Main Stem Bohème opens at the Broadway Theatre on December 8, following an engagement in San Francisco. In case you haven't heard, this production is directed by Baz Luhrmann, whose post-modern movie musical Moulin Rouge -- partly inspired by Bohème and La Traviata -- was a box-office phenomenon. As he did with a previous Bohème for the Sydney Opera, Luhrmann has updated the action of the work to 1957, though the story is still set in Paris. "I'm against what we call 'Hamlet in Hawaii,' which is updating for the sake of trying to be groovy and swinging," the director told TheaterMania at a press junket for the show. "It becomes counterproductive when you have to explain more in justifying your additions. Any updating should be about revealing what is there. If it doesn't do that, it's an inappropriate device."

Luhrmann's Bohème features a cast of 60 performing the opera in Italian with the aid of English surtitles, thereby bringing to mainstream theatergoers a timeless story of young love doomed by terminal illness. The cast includes three sets of Rodolfos and Mimis (the central romantic duo) and two sets of Marcellos and Musettas (the secondary couple). As it turns out, several of these singers -- chosen from more than 2,000 auditionees from all over the world -- have previously performed Bohème with opera companies. "There's a lot of fantastic operas out there that have great stories, great abilities for singers to act," says Alfred Boe, one of the production's Rodolfos. "So I think this is something that should happen in the future -- to get more operas on Broadway, to break down that barrier between the classical opera house and the musical theater. Puccini didn't write La Bohème just for the elite or the aristocracy; he wrote it for the guy who sweeps the streets as much as for kings and queens. It's for everybody."

To hear those involved tell it, the casting process was painstaking. According to David Miller, who shares the role of Rodolfo with Boe and with Jesús Garcia, "It was a combination of finding the right look, the right sound, the right chemistry and connection between the couples. It was at the fifth or sixth callback, I think, when they started pairing us up, putting groups of bohemians together to see how the dynamics would work. I sang with five or six Mimis that day; but it wasn't until the audition process was finished that I actually found out who the Mimis were and it wasn't until we got to the first rehearsal that I knew which one I'd be singing with." (Miller's partner is Ekaterina Solovyeva.)

Though Miller had studied the role of Rodolfo, he had never sung it in performance before he was cast by Luhrmann -- nor had he ever seen a full production of La Bohème. "I have about 30 roles in my repertoire and I've seen about 40 or 50 different operas, but this is one that I just never got to," he says, "so I'm going in with a clean slate." Jessica Comeau, who alternates with Chloe Wright as Musetta, says that she very much appreciated the relatively lengthy rehearsal period for the production, which lasted for the entire month of August and the first week of September -- 10 hours a day. "It's not like this in opera," says Comeau. "There, it's three weeks of rehearsal and then opening night. You can do a good job, but how can you build a relationship with someone on stage? Having so much rehearsal time makes it really special."

Of course, Bohème may also be seen in town at the Metropolitan Opera or the New York City Opera -- but those shows do not have the Luhrmann touch. "Thirteen years ago," says Luhrmann, "the decision to update [the opera for the Sydney production] came from our mission...to make it as much as possible like the experience that the audience had in the 1890s. We realized we had too many obstacles that Puccini didn't have. His audience knew that these guys running around in velvet checked pants, floppy hats, and beards weren't ZZ Top -- they were bohemians."

What has it been like for Luhrmann and his colleagues to revisit Puccini's masterpiece? "The Sydney production was a very special experience for us," says the director, speaking on behalf of a creative team that prominently includes his wife and professional partner, Catherine Martin -- a double Oscar-winner for Moulin Rouge -- as set designer and co-costume designer. "At the time, we were bohemians ourselves, 25-year-olds," Luhrmann continues, "but I turned 40 in San Francisco on the day [the new production] opened. I think we've brought more gravity to the piece; it's a little bit more about the melancholia of saying goodbye to one's youth and embracing the future."

Soon enough, we'll know whether critics and audiences will embrace Luhrmann's vision -- whether or not La Bohème will fly on Broadway. It's an exciting gamble that's summed up by Eugene Brancoveanu, one of the production's two Marcellos (the other is Ben Davis). "I've always gone for wacky, crazy projects," says Brancoveanu, "because one day, you know, we all march into the grave. I wanted to be able to look back and say, 'I did La Bohème on Broadway.' It's like selling ice cream in Greenland: You don't usually do that, but if the ice cream's really good, it's going to be a hit."

The Luhrmann Bohème is produced by Jeffrey Seller and Kevin McCollum, who were also responsible for Rent, the terrific rock musical by Jonathan Larson that's based on Bohème. "We took Jonathan to the Met to see the opera and I think he learned a lot about how to structure Rent from it," says Seller. "You know, we have Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, both of which are genius. I feel the same way about La Bohème and Rent."

Needless to say, Seller is thrilled that Luhrmann is the lynchpin of the new Bohème. "You might expect to see Baz do this opera at the Met," he says, "but it wouldn't be the same audience. And you wouldn't get singers in their 20s. I think, if this works, you'll see three Broadway productions of operas announced within the next six months. Because, remember: If you get the right one, you don't have to pay royalties!"

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Break a Leg
Baz Luhrmann Goes Out on a Limb and Puts 'La Bohème' on Broadway
By Alona Wartofsky, The Washington Post
4 December 2002
(Images featured with this article can be found on the Miscellaneous Images page.)

NEW YORK

If meeting Baz Luhrmann were anything like watching a Baz Luhrmann movie, a pair of red curtains would be whisked apart to reveal the bristly-haired director surrounded by a sea of dancing girls, all extravagantly attired.

Real life is not the same as the movies, alas. Still, the Australian director of such showy film spectaculars as "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" and "Moulin Rouge" wouldn't be without some real-life razzle-dazzle.

The hotel suite where he is promoting his latest venture, a Broadway production of Puccini's "La Bohème," offers an amazing view of Manhattan. The space is dramatically lighted by dozens of votive candles. And then there is the spectacle of Luhrmann himself, a hipster barker decked out in a black pinstriped Prada suit and ostentatiously chunky shoes. His gray hair tufts out in several directions, suggesting nothing so much as an electrocuted bird.

Luhrmann, 40, says he has been eyeing Broadway for more than a decade, and the live division of his entertainment empire is developing stage musicals based on his first film, 1992's "Strictly Ballroom," and his most recent, last year's "Moulin Rouge."

But "La Bohème" made it to Broadway first. Luhrmann originally staged the work for the Australian Opera in Sydney 12 years ago. It was a hit and was eventually aired on PBS and released on home video. But the current production is different. "It's in the spirit of the Sydney production," says Luhrmann, "but it's of its own nature."

The most notable difference may be that the new "La Bohème" is being presented as a Broadway show -- eight performances a week as opposed to the repertory system in an opera house. Because the vocal strain inherent in performing opera makes that schedule impossible for any singer, three separate sets of leads will perform the show.

"I hadn't really finished what we began to do 13 years ago," says Luhrmann. "This began as a mission to bring 'La Bohème' to the audience for whom it was originally written, and that audience is everybody. And the place to find an audience that includes everyone is Broadway."

Earlier this fall, Luhrmann's new "La Bohème" was given a six-week test run in San Francisco, where critics were for the most part effusive and many, though not all, performances sold out. Celebrity attendees included actor Kevin Spacey and filmmaker George Lucas as well as Luhrmann's friend and fellow Australian Nicole Kidman, the star of "Moulin Rouge."

As part of the crush of publicity preceding Sunday's opening of "La Bohème" at the Broadway Theatre, Vogue recently published selections from a diary Luhrmann kept while making what the magazine characterized as "one of the biggest gambles in Broadway history." In an entry dated June 17, 2001, the director, who has never missed an opportunity to depict himself as a maverick, examines his audacious nature: "People are always saying that I'm a fearless person. That's not true. Half the time I'm shaking -- literally trembling -- from the things I get myself into. 'LB' on Broadway -- there's a death wish if there ever was one."

Does Luhrmann, sipping vitamin water in this swanky hotel suite, still consider "La Bohème" a death wish?

"I don't think 'death wish' is my language," he says. "I would have said it's suicidal.

"Look, there are easier ways and quicker ways to have a hit on Broadway than doing Italian opera in the original language," he says. "You can't say enough about that. You can't really be clear enough that as well as it seems to have gone so far, it's an extraordinarily risky venture."

A Beatnik 'Bohème'

The idea for "La Bohème" on Broadway didn't actually originate with Luhrmann. Producing partners Kevin McCollum and Jeffrey Seller conceived the project while they were putting together Jonathan Larson's wildly popular "Rent" in 1995. "Rent," a musical about love among starving artists in New York's East Village, was based on "La Bohème," an opera about love among starving bohemians in Paris's Latin Quarter. Friends suggested that McCollum and Seller watch Luhrmann's "La Bohème," and both were taken with the director's approach. "We thought it would be cool to have 'Rent' running downtown and 'La Bohème' running uptown at the same time," says McCollum. He and Seller sent several letters to Luhrmann, who was always busy with other projects -- first "Romeo + Juliet," then "Moulin Rouge."

"We got rejected quite a lot. We're nothing if not diligent in our pursuit," says McCollum. Then two years ago, they got a call from Luhrmann, who announced he was coming to New York.

The producers raised $6.5 million to mount "La Bohème," which is considerably less than such recent Broadway outings as "The Producers" and "Hairspray." (Those two hits, according to industry sources, cost approximately $10 million apiece. Luhrmann's first "La Bohème" back in Sydney cost about $60,000.)

McCollum and Seller, who produced another hit, "De La Guarda," off-Broadway in 1998, do not consider "La Bohème" as risky as Luhrmann claims to. "Anytime you're the first at doing something, to some it will seem suicidal, and to some it will seem like an opportunity," says McCollum. "We're contrarians. We are doing an opera in Italian on Broadway. It's never been done. In an age where the state of the art is what's the formula, our belief is there shouldn't be a formula."

Casting the production took more than a year. Determined to find young, attractive performers, Luhrmann's staff conducted what he describes as an "Olympics of opera." More than 2,000 singers were auditioned. Luhrmann then workshopped nearly 200, looking for what he describes as "the triple threat" -- performers who looked good, sang well and knew how to act. "Ultimately the first requirement was that they had to have outstanding vocal ability," says Luhrmann. "This was about true opera singers, which means you just had to have the pipes."

"La Bohème," based on Henri Murger's novel "Scenes de la Vie de Bohème," was set in 1840. When Luhrmann mounted his first "Bohème" back in 1990, he and his creative partner, production and costume designer, Catherine Martin (now his wife), spent time in Italy, where Puccini wrote the opera, and in France, where it was set. They decided to move the setting up to the Left Bank of 1957.

It was not an arbitrary decision. "One thing I do loathe myself is what we call 'Hamlet in Hawaii' -- which is update it to be funky," says Luhrmann. "Any choice we make is about revealing the text and the music. . . . We did it to make the characters clear to our audience."

They chose 1957 rather than 1840 in part because contemporary audiences are unfamiliar with the fashions of 1840. "How to make clear even what a bohemian is?" he asks. The year 1957, he says, was "a relatively precise social and economic match," and the fashions worn by the characters would telegraph something to audiences. Mimi's death from tuberculosis also dictated their choice: "It was the last year just before they inoculated in a large spectrum against tuberculosis in France."

The translation used in the surtitles is updated to reflect the tone of 1957. Characters use terms like "man," "daddy-o" and "chick."

"Puccini didn't have to worry about language. It was in Italian and his audience was Italian," says Luhrmann. "We have to worry about these things. We have to make lateral leaps through devices to help audiences get into it. To make it as visceral -- to make it as real, to feel it.

"Fundamentally, Puccini's 'La Bohème' is a very simple universal story told through hugely emotional and accessible music. And there should be no reason why a child or an adult or any person couldn't have an emotional reaction to it."

Updated versions of classics have become one of Luhrmann's trademarks. His goal with the opera, he says, was "not to allow it to be caked in, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of someone's memory of an early-20th-century production probably seen in 1930 that has by the very legend of it become the watermark for how you should do Puccini."

"La Bohème" features another of Luhrmann's trademarks as well. In the Sydney production, Rodolfo declares his love for Mimi in front of a rooftop sign whose cursive red lettering reads "L'Amour." That sign appears in different forms throughout Luhrmann's work. "We've always 'quotated' it, which is a word I made up meaning to quote and make note of," he says. "In 'Strictly Ballroom,' the lovers kiss in front of a Coca-Cola sign. In 'Romeo + Juliet,' there's a moment when Romeo walks past "L'Amour" as a Coca-Cola sign -- don't tell Coca-Cola. And in 'Moulin Rouge,' you've got mad love, 'L'Amour Fou.' "

Luhrmann and Martin were married in 1997 in an office, but the following day they celebrated with a reception at the Sydney Opera House. "We built a church on the stage, and 'L'Amour' was the back of the church," he says.

"It was actually fantastic," he says with a girlish giggle. "You wouldn't believe it, but with all of our experience with stage management, the bride was incredibly late."

Let's Put On a Show

Luhrmann grew up in Herron's Creek, a small town in New South Wales where his father, a former naval diver and Vietnam veteran, owned a farm, a gas station and, briefly, the local cinema.

"We had a very, very intense father," says Luhrmann. "Apart from his obsession that we must be the renaissance men of Herron's Creek -- we had to do commando training and learn to paint, music, dance -- we had very extreme crew cuts. This must be like '75, David Cassidy was big, and he never had a crew cut, right? So we were totally ostracized because of our hair."

They may have had trouble making friends, but Luhrmann and his three siblings kept busy. "Having grown up extremely isolated in a tiny station in the middle of absolutely nowhere, with a very intense father who was . . . dropping us in the bush so we were learning commando tactics and having us ballroom-dance, we were endlessly active," he says.

The Luhrmann kids made amateur movies and operated a faux radio station. "In terms of a creative life, there's very little difference in the feeling of what I do now and the way it felt when I was 10 and 12 years old in Herron's Creek. It feels exactly the same. It's the same thing: Projects! Things! Make! Do! Create! What if! Let's go!"

When his parents divorced, Luhrmann, whose first name up until this point was Mark, let his hair grow. He quickly picked up the nickname Baz, after Basil Brush, a bushy-tailed fox that appeared on a popular BBC comedy series.

While in his late twenties and early thirties, Luhrmann staged several productions for the Australian Opera, including "Lake Lost" and a Hindi interpretation of Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." When the Australian Opera announced that he would do an updated "La Bohème," he says, many subscribers canceled. "It was a huge controversy," he says proudly. "Bohème" turned out to be a smash hit for the company, and was revived two times before the production was retired in 1996.

His directorial screen debut, "Strictly Ballroom," was originally conceived for the stage. That film, inspired by his own experiences as a ballroom dancer, was the first of what he refers to as his "Red Curtain Trilogy." Luhrmann says the film's motto -- "a life lived in fear is a life half-lived" -- still guides him.

His second film, "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet," turned Leonardo DiCaprio into a teen heartthrob and proved that with enough car chases, gunplay and pretty faces, even Shakespeare can feel like MTV.

The trilogy's final film, "Moulin Rouge," revisits Luhrmann's favorite themes -- doomed, idealized love and grandiose dreams. The film's plot bears some resemblance to that of "La Bohème" -- the characters are bohemians, of course, and like Mimi, the beautiful courtesan Satine (Kidman) is dying. Luhrmann's films are intense visual experiences characterized by swirling colors and movement, and people tend to have strong reactions to his work. In other words, if you don't love his films, you probably hate them. Those who weren't dazzled by the visual intensity of "Romeo + Juliet" and "Moulin Rouge" may have found them headache-inducing.

The films' heightened theatricality (the metaphorical red curtain) is an inversion of the naturalism that characterizes most contemporary filmmaking. "Psychological naturalism is just another set of conventions," he scoffs. "It's not real. It's a set of conventions that make you think that you're seeing reality."

Luhrmann and Martin currently preside over a conglomerate that includes divisions devoted to film, live performance, music and design. Even as they have been occupied with bringing "La Bohème" to Broadway, work has already begun on their next project, a film about Alexander the Great. DiCaprio is slated to play him and filming is set to begin by the end of next year.

Some of the extras have also been cast. "The prince of Thailand is giving me a huge chunk of elephants," he says cheerfully.

One of the main reasons Luhrmann chose to do "La Bohème" on Broadway was the decision he and Martin made to live part of the time in New York.

Another is that he was close to turning 40. " 'La Bohème' seemed to me like a goodbye kiss to our bohemian youth, to revisit it at the other end of that journey, and complete the work and say goodbye to it. We got it done just in time. I turned 40 just as we were opening in San Francisco."

But because "Moulin Rouge" received mixed reviews, he devoted months to promoting "Bohème" all over the world. "If something you make is like a child," he says darkly, "there were a lot of people who would have liked to have seen it dead."

As a result, the opening was postponed so many times that Luhrmann lost some of his enthusiasm for the project. Then he went down to the World Trade Center site. "I think one has to be extremely delicate about this. . . . It can be exploited in an inappropriate way," he says.

"The idea of doing 'La Bohème' . . . being here, making something beautiful that is about humanity. Maybe it seemed an indulgent refuge, but it seemed really important," he says.

"I'm not saying it was gonna change the world, but it felt like it could be useful. It could be useful to make an effort to create something of human beauty, with beautiful music and powerful story in a town that had just changed forever."


© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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Baz Luhrmann Brings Splashy 'La Bohème' to Broadway
The buzz on Broadway is all about Baz
By Martha Graybow, Reuters
3 December 2002
(The image featured with this article can be found on the Miscellaneous Images page.)

Australian film director Baz Luhrmann, best known for visually dazzling movies such as "Moulin Rouge" and "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet," brings his splashy stage version of Giacomo Puccini's opera "La Bohème" to Broadway this month, one of the most anticipated events of the theater season.

But is Broadway, home to dramas and musicals but not full-length, 19th century Italian opera, ready for Luhrmann?

Even he isn't sure. But he thinks his revved-up production featuring a cast of 20-something singers and an updated setting will appeal to a mass audience unfamiliar with opera.

"Ultimately, it was written for audiences from all kinds of backgrounds," he said of Puccini's ode to bohemian life in Paris. "That's where it began."

Already, "La Bohème" was well-received during an October run in San Francisco. Previews in New York began Nov. 29, with opening night slated for Sunday.

"One thing we learned from San Francisco is audiences who have never been to the opera before are coming out saying, 'That's so clear. I know what's going on and I felt for the characters,"' Luhrmann said, speaking at a recent media gathering in New York.


The opera, a reprise of a production Luhrmann first staged in 1990 at the Sydney Opera House, hews to Puccini's music and is sung in the original Italian. Luhrmann brought together singers from around the world, including China and Russia, in what he has called "the young Olympics of opera."

The production's faithfulness to Puccini's music is a big difference from another Broadway production inspired by "La Bohème," the long-running "Rent." The producers of "Rent," a rock opera set in contemporary New York, also are backing Luhrmann's Broadway debut.

DEPARTING FROM TRADITION

It's also a departure from Luhrmann's last musical outing, the movie "Moulin Rouge," which was set in a 19th century dance hall but had a modern pop soundtrack.

But Luhrmann and his wife and collaborator, Academy Award-winning art director Catherine Martin, take other liberties with "La Bohème." The setting is still Paris, but instead of the 1830s it is now a film noir-like 1950s. Luhrmann and Martin updated the setting because they wanted to make it more accessible to modern audiences.

The set also is more open than the traditional opera set.

"Everything is exposed," Martin said. "Baz basically subverts the convention of opera, which is that there is a big red curtain and behind a big red curtain all these secret things happen."

Luhrmann also is cutting out what he calls some of the "artifice" of traditional opera by casting younger singers in the roles of the starving artists, scrapping the formal bows opera singers typically take throughout a performance and speeding up the dialogue.

"With our cinema we've been exploring the theatrical cinematic language of the '30s and the '40s," he said. "With opera in a way we've been naturalizing it more ... We are trying to make it more grounded, slightly more believable."

He's also courting a younger audience. On the show's Web site, ticket buyers are told "you can dress any way you want" -- perhaps a dig at the well-dressed crowd at the Metropolitan Opera a few blocks away.

Staging an opera on Broadway has presented many challenges, such as how to keep up a grueling schedule of night-after-night performances. The roles of doomed lovers Mimi and Rodolfo are performed by three rotating pairs of singers, so that they do not overuse their voices.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Luhrmann also has stressed acting and character development, something often missing from opera, his young cast members say. During rehearsals, he asked the singers to write their parts in their own words, then act out the scenes in English so they could better understand the characters.

"It was all about helping you get down and dig into the truth of any given moment," said 25-year-old Jesus Garcia, one of the rotating Rodolfos.

Bringing the estimated $6.5 million production to Broadway took years, mostly because Luhrmann was busy with various film projects. He says he and Martin originally conceptualized the opera when they were "25-year-old bohemians" themselves, but he thinks the new version reflects their own maturity as artists.

"Now, turning 40, I guess we look upon it as ... sort of a farewell kiss to our own creative bohemian," he said.

He's preparing to move on to his next project, a film version of Alexander the Great. "I always wanted to do this musical work and then epic works," he said.

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All that Baz
What does a director who revolutionized the movie musical with Moulin Rouge do for a follow-up act? Get ready, Broadway
Richard Ouzounian, Theatre Critic, Toronto Star Newspaper
30 November 2002
(The image of Baz on top of a Manhattan skyscraper featured with this article can be found on the Miscellaneous Images page.)

NEW YORK - Baz Luhrmann is on the edge.

Literally. And figuratively.

The man who revolutionized the movie musical with Moulin Rouge! leans over the balcony railing outside his midtown Manhattan penthouse hotel suite, risking his life for the sake of a photograph. "I can just see the headlines now," he shouts over the traffic din. "Flamboyant Australian Director Plunges To His Death On The Eve Of His Greatest Triumph.

"Hell, it better be my greatest triumph," he looks down 15 floors to the street, "or I might as well wind up down there."

He's talking about La Bohème, his $10-million stage version of Puccini's opera, which started previews last night prior to its Dec. 8 opening on Broadway, after a critically acclaimed tryout in San Francisco.

It's more than just another gamble for the artist, also famous for the films Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet. Combined with Moulin Rouge!, they form a trio of works marked by incredible theatricality and over-the-top romanticism. Luhrmann refers to them as his "Red Curtain Trilogy," and he's just released a five-DVD box set to say "hail and farewell" to this period in his work.

Luhrmann is ringing down the red curtain on the first act of his life, and he knows you've got to send the audience off to intermission with one hell of a buzz. That's what he hopes La Bohème will accomplish.

It was a smaller version of this same production that launched his career when, at the age of 28, he staged it for the Australian Opera in 1990. He took Puccini's classic tale of starving artists, loving and dying in mid-19th century Paris, and boldly moved it to 1957.

Then he proceeded to do what he's done with every project he's touched: Cast it with attractive young performers, splash it with eye-catching colour and stage it within an inch of its life.

The end result was a smash, and it launched Luhrmann into a 12-year trajectory that's allowed no time for looking back. But that's what he wants to do on this particular afternoon as he settles down into a chair in this achingly chic hotel suite.

His hair is stylishly trim, and he wears a well-cut dark suit with an open-collared shirt. The effect is part hip, part establishment. Would you buy a used opera from this man? He certainly hopes you would.

He swigs thirstily from a vitamin-laced bottle of water, tinted a green you only expect to see in a Luhrmann movie, as he goes back into his past.

Bazmark Anthony Luhrmann was born in 1962, in the back seat of a car that was racing his mother to the hospital in a suburb of Sydney. When he was still a baby, the family moved to an isolated part of New South Wales.

"What kind of kid was I then? The same kind of kid I am now. Extremely busy. My father was a bit mad, you see. He thought that we had to be the renaissance kids of Herron's Creek.

"We had to learn commando training as well as photography, how to grow corn as well as how to play a musical instrument. We were up at 5 in the morning, and then we just went until we dropped. The town consisted of a gas station, a pig farm, a dress shop and a movie theatre - and we ran them all. Well, we didn't start out running the movies, but the man in charge of it died of a heart attack. My dad had been a naval diver and photographer in the Vietnam War, and he knew how to thread film, so he took over."

He radiates energy as he remembers that time. "That was an enormous thing for us. Every night we would sit in the projection room and see the film. It made a huge impression on me."

It's no surprise that musicals had the greatest impact. "Hello, Dolly!, The Sound Of Music, even dear old Paint Your Wagon. I saw them all and loved them all."

But while the nights provided him with a cinematic education, the days proved equally enlightening. "As a kid pumping gas, I saw an endless stream of humanity arrive from the big city, pass through and then leave. Everyone from families, Hare Krishnas, lovers breaking up ... and you're invisible to them.

"I guess that's why I've always been interested in people's characters." He snaps his fingers. "Who's that person? What's that person? Where are they coming from?"

So, with an ever-changing cast of characters during the day and a constantly rotating series of films every night, it was only natural that Luhrmann would start to create on his own. "What I do now is exactly what I did then," he cheerfully volunteers. "I got an idea, put the kids together, pulled a sheet over the shed and made a story."

But this world Luhrmann found so entrancing ended abruptly after his parents' divorce when he was 12. He refers to it several times as a "schism" in the family, and it's obvious he still carries strong feelings about the breakup with him nearly 30 years later. His all-controlling father was grappling with alcoholism, while his mother wanted to make up for the years she thought she had wasted in the outback.

"I don't know just what Mum felt she had been missing," Luhrmann recalls, "but she sure let everyone know how unhappy she was."

The actual breakup was "horrible" in Luhrmann's own words, "a dark cloud that hung over our family for years and then suddenly burst." But when it was through, he chose to stay behind with his father.

After a few years, his father remarried, and the unhappy dynamics of that relationship drove the 15-year-old Luhrmann "down the yellow brick road back to the city and my mother."

"And as if things weren't bad enough for me already, she enrolled me in an all-boys school run by the Christian Brothers. For me, that was a retrograde step. It spun my world out."

For the first time, Luhrmann looks less than amiable, and his smile turns into an almost feral growl. "But that didn't stop me. There never was a time that I wasn't making something - magic shows, a modern-dress Henry IV. I used to take TV shows and redo them as plays. Starsky And Hutch was a big fave."

More disappointment was waiting for Luhrmann when he tried to enter the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art, only to be rejected for being too young (he was 17 at the time).

He turned the defeat into victory by getting himself cast in a major Australian film, The Winter Of Our Dreams, opposite Judy Davis.

"I was Pete the Pimp." He flashes the Luhrmann leer. "Fancy that. Not old enough for theatre school, but old enough to play a pimp."

Luhrmann finally got into the institute, landed a gig as Peter Brook's assistant on The Mahabarata, then co-wrote and directed a play called Strictly Ballroom, which would later serve as the basis of his first feature film.

After leaving school, he took work as an actor to support a series of fledgling theatre and opera companies. He wound up directing a new experimental opera, Lake Lost, for the Australian Opera in 1987.

Looking for a designer to help with that production, he met Catherine Martin. Since then, they have been professionally inseparable, although it took a while for the relationship to morph into romance.

"CM" is what Luhrmann nicknamed her, and now everyone she works with calls her that. They won't be interviewed or photographed together, and so it's down the corridor to another stylish penthouse suite to chat with the woman who won two Oscars for her design work on Moulin Rouge!.

Even the film's severest critics had plenty of praise for Martin's stupendous nightclub settings and her hundreds of eye-catching costumes. Her work manages to combine the seeming contradiction of being impeccably researched and outrageously indulgent.

"All musicals," decrees Luhrmann, "are about the lie that reveals the truth, and CM is absolutely brilliant at capturing that in her designs."

Martin is a pleasant blonde pavlova of a woman - sweet and seemingly fluffy, but with some real crunch underneath. She sits calmly sipping tea, dressed in a symphony of earth tones arranged with a designer's eye.

At 37, she's three years younger than Luhrmann and has been drawn to the visual arts since earliest childhood. "I loved painting and sewing and knitting and making candles," she giggles in her broad Australian accent. "I was a craft kitsch child. I still love a bit of craft."

While Luhrmann was pumping gas in the outback, Martin was being buzzed around the world by doting parents who took her to New York and Disneyworld and who remained philosophical during her difficult adolescence.

"I was extremely rebellious, very badly behaved. Played hooky for an entire year. Did everything my parents didn't want me to do." She hastens to minimize the damage. "It wasn't like I was injecting heroin in my eyes or smoking crack on the streets."

Then what was she doing? "Well," she admits shamefacedly, "going to the movies, mainly."

She seemed like a mate made in heaven for Luhrmann, but when they first met, "I didn't know it was going to be a life-changing moment."

Things started to change when "I saw how everything in the production we were working on came together. Then I said, `That person is a genius!' I realized he was very special."

Even after that, it wasn't what anyone would call a whirlwind courtship. They finally married in 1997 on the stage of the Sydney Opera House while music from their various productions played and the Australian Opera's technical director, Noel Staunton, was flown in on wires, wearing a tutu, to bless the happy couple.

It's back down the hall to Luhrmann, who recalls the first show they did together that rocked the world: their 1990 La Bohème. "The people at the Australian Opera said to me, `Our audiences are dying off, and we want you to bring new audiences in here, young audiences, and we want you to do that by taking this beloved old dusty La Bohème and producing it as if it were being done for the first time.'"

Luhrmann laughs, gets up and starts pacing around the room as he recalls how it all came together. "To do research we lived the bohemian life in Paris - me and CM and another designer named Bill Marron." The grin is positively wicked. "We were wildly out of control. Our young bohemian days were pretty bohemian!"

They rejected doing it in the original period. "How could kids relate to people running around in floppy hats and checkered vests and beards like ZZ Top?"

Eventually they settled on 1957 as being "a good social and political match," and after some initial audience complaints, Dame Joan Sutherland led a standing ovation on opening night, and all was well.

Within a year, Luhrmann had started making a film of Strictly Ballroom, and the enthusiastic reception it received on its release in 1992 paved the way for his 1996 modernization of Romeo + Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

But everything, in many ways, was a warm-up for Moulin Rouge!, the romantic musical fantasy starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan MacGregor, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, grossed over $250 million worldwide and earned eight Oscar nominations.

All of Luhrmann's work - from La Bohème through Moulin Rouge! - has been so hugely romantic that it's fascinating to ponder how he defines that word.

"I'm romantic," he declares after a pause, "because when I look at the world, I see it through my own perspective, with a heightened emotional distance. Sure, I've fallen in love a lot - usually with the people I create with in a variety of relationships." His eyes flash as he quotes one of his favourite lines from Strictly Ballroom: "There isn't only one way to cha-cha-cha."

Martin has a different spin on things. "Romance to me is making something beautiful out of nothing. And the sadness of knowing those things will always end."

"It's not just love between men and women, or men and men, or women and women. It's closeness, it's dream-weaving. It's going into the unknown, having an idea and pursuing it to the end."

Luhrmann returns to the world of La Bohème as he settles down again. "I relate to the journey of a young man who goes with his friends and lives the bohemian life and dreams of being creative. And then reality comes crashing down on him. Oh, I understand that on a very personal level."

"You see, when you're under 30, you don't realize what a get-out-of-jail-free card you've got. Then slam! The door to the cage comes down at 30. And if you try to hold onto your youthful idealism past that, it will destroy you."

For the first time, Luhrmann looks tired. "I've just turned 40. I look back on my life so far, and I think of what Strindberg said in The Dream Play: `It's great, but it's not what I thought it was going to be.'"

"Growing up is realizing that it's not about how many groovy hotels you stay in or how many wild nights you have. Ultimately, you have to let go of it and discover a new and interesting life."

All the flash is gone as he speaks simply. "If I don't make that transition, I'll be in a lot of trouble. Because I'll wind up getting it all and losing it all."

Just like the hero of his next movie, Alexander The Great, which he starts filming next year in Morocco, again starring DiCaprio.

"I'm doing that film because I fear that I might be like him (Alexander). He keeps pursuing a horizon that never comes, but it's the pursuit that distracts him. Distracts him and destroys him."

He looks off in the distance, his mind already halfway to Morocco. "I won't let it destroy me."

But all of that is still to come in the second act of Baz Luhrmann's life.

First he'll take Manhattan, then he'll take La Bohème.

Additional articles by Richard Ouzounian

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Baz's "Bohème" Bows on B'way
By Josh Grossberg, E Online
27 November 2002
(The image featured with this article can be found on the Miscellaneous Images page.)

Is Baz Luhrmann committing "professional suicide?"

The Aussie director, who first gained notice transforming La Bohème into a hit at the Sydney Opera House in 1990, is now bringing Puccini's acclaimed opera to Broadway in what some are calling the most audacious production ever staged--and a move the director says might be tantamount to "professional suicide."

After all, we're talking opera on Broadway, sung in its original Italian, eight performances a week with a full-blown 26-piece orchestra and three rotating casts.

A hard sell, yes, but the Moulin Rouge mastermind thinks he can pull it off--and even make it palatable to seemingly opera- (not to mention theater-) averse Gen-Xers.

"When Puccini and his librettists created La Bohème, opera was actually the popular entertainment of the day," says Luhrmann. "With our cast of young singers, we hope to tell this story in a way that will appeal not only to the people who love Puccini's music, but to the younger audiences who may never have seen an opera before. It's always our job as storytellers to re-enliven that story."

Puccini's original opera told a tale of the tragic love affair between the seamstress Mimi and the poet Rodolfo set against the world of 19th century bohemian Paris.

As he did with his Sydney production, the 40-year-old director has discarded the 1830s setting and moved the show to post-war Paris circa 1957, a time of poodle skirts, cardigans and Jimmy Dean--what the director calls "a period that's a perfect socio-economic match."

Luhrmann's initial staging of La Bohème opened in 1990 to rave reviews and went on to become the biggest hit in Sydney Opera House history. It was staged again to packed houses in 1993 as well as in 1996, where it was recorded for video.

The producers of Rent saw the video, called up Luhrmann and pitched him the idea of doing it on Broadway, and it didn't take long for him to sign on.

Under his Bazmark Live banner, Luhrmann and company conducted an exhaustive two-year international search, auditioning more than 3,000 twenty-something singers, before finally settling on 50 ensemble members and three sets of Mimis and Rodolfos.

The decision to go with a rotating cast was made to avoid straining the young stars' voices given the rigorous schedule of a Broadway show.

Luhrmann also opted to mike his performers--unusual for opera, but something he felt was necessary given the acoustics of New York's Broadway Theater, where La Bohème will be staged.

Sets and costumes are being designed as usual by Luhrmann's wife, Catherine Martin, who won two Academy Awards for her work on Moulin Rouge.

But those who detested Moulin Rouge can take heart. There won't be any rogue "Roxannes" or "Like a Virgins" popping up. As conducted by Constantine Kitsopoulos (who has worked both in opera houses and on Broadway musicals), Baz's Bohème, billed as "greatest love story ever sung," will remain faithful to Puccini's music. English translations will be projected above the stage.

Luhrmann says La Bohème brings an end to his "Red Curtain" period, which included 1992's Strictly Ballroom, 1996's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge.

"When we first did La Bohème, we were 25 ourselves," says the director. "Now, since I turned 40 in San Francisco the day we opened, it's a sort of farewell kiss to that whole bohemian youth of our creative life."

La Bohème, which did a limited preview run in San Francisco in October to sold-out audiences and critical plaudits, is drawing Tony buzz and has already presold $3 million in tickets. Top seats go for $95, but producers have announced the first two rows for each performance of La Bohème will go on sale at the theater box office the day of the show for only $20.

Previews for La Bohème begin at the Broadway Theater on Friday, November 29 and the curtain officially goes up on December 8.

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Baz rolls out a PR blitz for Bohème
The Sydney Morning Herald
26 November 2002
(The image featured with this article can be found on the Miscellaneous Images page.)

The opening night of La Bohème, directed by Baz Luhrmann with a score by some Puccini guy, is not until tomorrow, but a casual observer in New York could be excused for thinking it had already opened to rave reviews.

Put simply, La Bohème is everywhere, with the traditional print campaign augmented by a glossy television spot directed by Luhrmann himself.

Last week, Luhrmann and many of his creative team held court at a jammed news conference at Manhattan hotel for 125 reporters from around the world and across the net. Many were playing catch-up; Luhrmann and his show had already been the subject of a flattering segment on Today as well as articles in Newsweek, Vanity Fair and an eight-page photo spread in Vogue.

Then there's cross-marketing. Catherine Martin, Luhrmann's wife and chief designer, struck a deal with Mont Blanc, the luxury goods maker, to design boutique displays in a Bohème style for 49 shops across the US, an arrangement that also has a Mont Blanc sign prominent in the set design.

In turn, Montblanc is returning the favour by sending out fliers to 20,000 clients, presumably those types who like opera and nice pens.

From The New York Times

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Baz Is Broadway Bound
'La Bohème' with a po-mo vibe: the 'Moulin Rouge' director brings new life to a grand old opera
By John Horn, Newsweek
25 November 2002
(The image featured with this article can be found on the Miscellaneous Images page.)

This is not your parents' "La Bohème." The music filling the San Francisco rehearsal studio is unmistakably Giacomo Puccini's. But the four singers are so young they'd be carded if they tried to order a beer, and the striking woman singing Musetta displays a bare, toned midriff. And the director, Baz Luhrmann, is doing his best to make sure they don't comport themselves like opera singers.

AS THEY RUN through the third act's signature quartet, he jots away on the tiny note cards he wears around his neck like dog tags. The tenor and the baritone, he sees, are relying on such stock operatic gestures as hands on hips and balled fists-they're not really interacting, but playing at interacting. "The only guide is real life," Luhrmann tells his performers. "If it can happen in life, it can happen here, on this stage."

Luhrmann has built a brilliant career by taking genres young audiences largely dread, if they know them at all-Elizabethan drama, movie musicals and now opera-and reinventing them with passionate, kinetic style. The Australian director's first film, "Strictly Ballroom," gave a rumba competition more bounce than a Gwen Stefani video. His next, "Romeo + Juliet," adapted Shakespeare for a generation raised on MTV. Last year's Oscar-winning "Moulin Rouge" beamed a dozen pop songs a century back in time. And now-before he starts postmodernizing the historical epic with "Alexander the Great," starring Leonardo DiCaprio-Luhrmann has returned to his first artistic crush, Puccini's 1896 opera of love and tuberculosis among the young, the poor and the arty.

"La Bohème" is a perfect fit for this 40-year-old bohemian and his production designer-and wife-Catherine Martin. As in "Moulin Rouge," they've got the great romantic themes-truth, beauty, freedom and love-set to music. "What is it that we have pursued above all things?" Luhrmann says. "Money? No, because 'Harry Potter' pays better. Fame, fortune? No. We have always pursued creative freedom. And the price of absolute creative freedom is that people will invariably say, 'You're doomed. It will never happen. You can't do that. It's crazy'." Still, Luhrmann isn't apt to cough his life away in a garret. His "La Bohème" has sold out every performance in its six-week San Francisco tryout. And when the $7.5 million show opens on Broadway Dec. 8-the first traditional opera ever to play there-it will be Manhattan's hippest date.

But don't buy a ticket expecting arias set for twin turntables. Yes, the leads are all athletic twentysomethings rather than Voigts and Pavarottis, and Marlon Brando posters are plastered across a set that looks like Christian's "Moulin Rouge" flat. And yes, Rodolfo's garret in 1957 Paris displays Luhrmann and Martin's signature L'AMOUR neon sign, which appears in their last two films. But Luhrmann hasn't changed a note of Puccini's music, and the characters still sing in Italian. In fact, this is largely a revival of the production Luhrmann mounted in Sydney in 1990-before he'd directed a film. He simply wants to undo some of opera's encrusted, alienating conventions. It took the Metropolitan Opera until 1995 to use electronic translations, and its prime tickets exclude all but the superrich. (Seats in the first two rows of "La Bohème" will cost just $20, as they do for "Rent," which was put on by the same producers.) In updating "La Bohème," Luhrmann has paradoxically returned Mimi and Rodolfo's romance to something like Puccini's own era, when regular folks went to the opera and "Che gelida manina" was a pop hit.

In this back-to-basics spirit, Luhrmann's singers change costumes and apply makeup in full view of the audience; in order to simulate a fireplace's glow, stagehands visibly wave a red light in Rodolfo's face. What remains is a passionate, sometimes painful love story. "The intent of both 'Moulin Rouge' and 'La Bohème' is the same," Luhrmann says. "To enforce, to demand, to engage the audience's participation. Neither production is a passive experience. You have to buy into it. And if you don't buy into it, then you have to leave. Both of them are about slapping you in the face and saying, 'It's now time for you to make an effort to live this experience'."

Luhrmann doesn't make it easy on his cast, either. Because "La Bohème" plays a throat-shredding eight shows a week, multiple singers take the lead roles on different nights: three pairings of the seamstress Mimi and the poet Rodolfo, and two combinations of the painter Marcello and his off-and-on flame Musetta. Luhrmann's team auditioned 2,000 singers-almost all with formal operatic training-to find 10 who could both sing and act. Then he worked with them on motivation for a month before he even let them sing. "Usually, you get two weeks to rehearse," says David Miller, 29, one of the Rodolfos, "and it's all about traffic patterns and stock gestures-it's like pantomime. You don't have time to delve into character."

Whatever the New York critics think of Luhrmann's efforts-Bay Area reviewers were reverent-he has, at the very least, breathed new life into another cultural relic. In San Francisco it's common to see teenagers dragging their parents to "La Bohème." Purists roll their eyes at the miked singing, the partially synthesized strings and such liberties as the supertitle in which a character complains, "I'm freezing my ass off." At intermission, one woman wailed to her husband, "Please, take me to the opera." But neophytes seem entranced. Dianna and Tom Pellicer, 35 and 40 respectively, had never seen an opera before they drove an hour into San Francisco to wait another hour in line for last-minute "La Bohème" cancellations. "It's really a simple story," Dianna said afterward. "Everybody can understand love." That's music to Luhrmann's ears; after all, he undertook the show, with its populist, united-we-sit ethos, as a response to September 11. "I just felt that more than ever, we need something that expresses the beautiful side of humanity with beautiful music," he says. Just maybe, if it can happen on the stage, it can happen in life.

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Baz Luhrmann Prepares to Open Bohème on Broadway
By Michael Kuchwara, Adante
25 November 2002

NEW YORK (AP) - Baz Luhrmann is upfront about the challenge: "Bringing Italian opera to Broadway is not the easiest way to have a hit," he says with a laugh.

"I'm used to it. Everything I've ever made has been an enormous risk — with people saying, 'Are you crazy?' I'm not that heroic or brave. But there are things that for very personal and vivid reasons I want to go and do."

The 40-year-old Australian director already has made a name for himself with such films as the high-energy Strictly Ballroom, a punkish, pop-flavored William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and the even more wildly extravagant Moulin Rouge.

Now, he's coming to New York with a $7.5 million, populist production of La Bohème, plunked down in 1950s Paris, sung in the original Italian (with English surtitles) and starring a cast of youthful, sexy singers who could surprise both opera purists and Broadway show folk.

"La Bohème really was the television of its time — it plays to the child and to the adult," the director states emphatically. "And if you are looking to play to everyone, you are not going to find them in a state theater or an opera house, you are going to find them on Broadway."

Opera has had an odd, fitful history on Broadway.

Disney's pop version of Aida, with a score by Elton John and Tim Rice, has been a considerable hit, still running after more than two years. But then, there was My Darlin' Aida (1952), which time-traveled Verdi's melodies to the Confederacy of the Civil War. It lasted three months.

Contemporary opera composers have had mixed success. Gian Carlo Menotti scored with two productions — a double bill of The Telephone and The Medium (1947) which ran for over 200 performances and The Consul, (1950) which lasted for eight months and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle prize for best musical of the season.

Kurt Weill's Street Scene (1947) and Marc Blitzstein's Regina, based on The Little Foxes, both flopped on Broadway, but later had runs in opera houses around the world.

Producers hope La Bohème will do better. Advance ticket sales are strong, although the producers declined to reveal exact figures. They started to climb after the theater's box office opened in October and after television stations in the New York area began showing a very stylized, 30-second commercial directed by Luhrmann, his first.

Luhrmann sits in the minimalist penthouse of a midtown Manhattan hotel, whose spartan decor can only be described as mausoleum chic. Lighted votive candles on the floor next to a fireplace give a vaguely monastic feel to the room.

The boyish director, sporting unruly blond hair, supplies his own ebullience. Dressed in the ubiquitous black — black pants, black jacket and black shoes — plus a formal white shirt and the required white T-shirt peeking through, he radiates a confidence that is disarming.

But then, a conversation with Luhrmann does not suffer from silences. Ask a question and he's off and running, sometimes in several directions at once. In a flash, you understand and appreciate where all the exuberant excesses of Moulin Rouge came from.

The director has been obsessed with La Bohème for a long time. He staged it in Australia at the Sydney Opera House in 1990. It was that version producers Jeffrey Seller and Kevin McCollum saw on American public television when they were working on another version of Puccini's opera, a little something called Rent.

"They used it as an example of how Rent should be," Luhrmann said.

"I agreed that we should revisit La Bohème and deal with the issue that we began with years ago, which is, addressing this work as if it were being done for the first time."

So far, the results have been encouraging. The production was rapturously received during its fall tryout in San Francisco by both critics and audiences. It quickly sold out, and Luhrmann was pleased by the people he reached. Some two-thirds were nonoperagoers.

"There was no demographic," he said. "One of the beautiful things happening was fathers taking their kids and telling them the story. But then, there were groovy, young 18-year-olds, people on date nights, and lots of old ladies, in the audience, too."

But that hasn't stopped the perfectionist Luhrmann from fine-tuning the show, which has settings designed by his wife, Catherine Martin, a woman he refers to affectionately in conversation as C.M.

So he's spending much of his time here at the Broadway Theatre, where La Bohème begins preview performances Nov. 29, in preparation for an opening on Dec. 8.

It took him two years to find the right cast for Puccini's tale of starving artists and doomed romance in late 19th-century Paris. Luhrmann's staff auditioned more than 2,000 singers in London, New York and Milan, Italy.

"I worked with 200 singers myself," he says, before settling on the three sets of Mimis and Rodolfos who star in the production. "It nearly wiped me out.

"These are not big-voiced, mature performers, but I did have three requirements: one, that they could sing it; two, that they could act it; and three, that they looked like the characters.

"And what I did do, because I didn't want them to have a generic look, was make sure they didn't look alike. For example, one Rodolfo is 6-foot-tall and blond, classically romantic; another is very James Dean-like and energetic. They give quite different interpretations. They deliver the same promise but with a different nuance."

And in San Francisco, Luhrmann said, the production received exactly the same enthusiastic reception, no matter who performed.

What will opera purists think, especially since the size of the orchestra has been reduced to accommodate Broadway's stringent economics? Luhrmann is unfazed.

"It is a smaller orchestra," he said, "but Puccini did reductions anyway to go on tour. "We haven't cut a single note. The music director is conducting the score more like Toscanini did with the original. Toscanini and Puccini were all about the rhythm of real life.

"What makes great theater doesn't necessarily make a great recording. As records became more about the voices — and consequently slower — every note was made beautiful, as opposed to a piece of theater. By going back to that, we've made the piece more rambunctious, more alive. People can't believe how quickly it goes by."

Luhrmann projects an evangelistic spirit as he warms to talking about how he works.

"At first, these things are my personal gesture," he says. But then, he talks and talks and talks things out with his wife "because she is my soul mate. Finally, though, I have to make the decision because I am the captain."

After La Bohème opens, Luhrmann plans to take some time off before plunging ahead next year with a new project — his film about Alexander the Great, a movie he has been planning for a decade. Plus there are stage versions of both Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge in the works. But don't look for them any time soon. "I don't rush things."

With homes in Sydney and New York and his own production company, Bazmark, Inc., Luhrmann doesn't need to worry about money and has confidently turned down a lot of projects.

"I'm not exactly like Disney, more like the Diaghilev Ballet," he said with a laugh. "There are things that I would like to do, but ultimately I end up doing the things I need to do artistically."

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The Show Must Go On
By Megan Turner, The New York Post
24 November 2002

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 Bohème" to Broadway.

Exhausted after the grueling world-wide promotional trek for "Moulin Rouge," Luhmann says, "We actually decided to cancel 'La Bohème' and pull out."

But after the Sept. 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 Bohème" 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 Bohème" into a splendiferous extravaganza, with costume and set design by Martin.

"La Bohème," 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 - which 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 Bohème' to the audience for whom it was written - which is everybody," says the director, who first mounted a production of "La Bohème" for the Australian Opera in 1990 to critical acclaim and commercial success.

"'La Bohème' was the television of its time, really. It was the 'Sex in the City' of the 1800s."

And "La Bohème" 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 Bohème" 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 Bohème," 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 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 Bohème" 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."

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Baz making sure N.Y. knows about 'Bohème'
By Jesse McKinley, New York Times - featured in Contra Costa Times
23 November 2002

NEW YORK - The previews for "La Bohème," directed by Baz Luhrmann with a score by some Puccini guy, don't begin at the Broadway Theater in New York until Nov. 29, but thanks to a surprisingly early and coordinated publicity campaign, a casual observer could be excused for thinking the show had already opened and received a round of rave reviews. (How many Tonys did it win again?) Of course, "La Bohème" did receive raves when it played in San Francisco in October.

Put simply, "La Bohème" is everywhere. The show has already begun an ample print campaign and, more surprising for Broadway, preopening television advertising, showing a glossy spot directed by Luhrmann himself in his television advertising debut. (If it looked familiar, it should; to keep costs low, Luhrmann used the same computerized images of Paris created for his film "Moulin Rouge.")

On Monday, the director and many on the show's creative team held court at a jammed news conference at the Millenium Hotel, an event that drew 125 reporters from around the world and across the Net. Many were playing catch-up; Luhrmann and his show had already been the subject of a flattering segment on "Today," as well as articles in Newsweek, Vanity Fair and Vogue, which gave "La Bohème" an eight-page photo spread to accompany Luhrmann's personal diary of the show's progress.

Then there's the cross-marketing. Catherine Martin, Luhrmann's wife and chief designer, has struck a deal with Montblanc, the luxury goods maker, to design boutique displays in a "Bohème" style for 49 shops nationwide, an arrangement that also has a Montblanc sign noticeably placed in the set design. (Piper-Heidsieck champagne is also represented.) Montblanc is returning the favor by sending out fliers to 20,000 customers, presumably the types who like opera and really nice pens.

One reason for the blitz is obvious: "La Bohème," reset in 1957 Paris, is not an easy sell. It's facing two obvious hurdles: It's an opera, and it's in Italian. (It will feature snappy surtitles in 1950s vernacular.) The show, which sold out its tryout run in San Francisco, is said to have a $3 million advance coming into previews, a respectable if not staggering figure for a $6.5 million musical. Crucial to the producers' hopes -- beyond Luhrmann and Martin's big-time talents -- is an effort to draw the young audiences who favor Luhrmann's hipster style.

"We're looking for a nontraditional opera audience and a nontraditional Broadway audience," Luhrmann said.

The "Bohème" push may also just be a sign that Broadway is becoming more attuned to marketing. "Movin' Out," a confirmed hit, used many of the same stratagems, including an early television advertising presence and cross-marketing.

For his part, despite his good reviews in San Francisco and good buzz here, Luhrmann says he's not taking anything for granted.

"Whatever the perception, it's a big house to fill, and we're doing an Italian opera in Italian on Broadway," he said. "So we're out there doing whatever we can to give it a chance."

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On Stage and Off - A Casting in Far and Away
By Jesse McKinley, New York Times
22 November 2002

[this is an excerpt from the full article, hence the title referring to another production]

'Bohème' Here, Bohème' There

The previews for "La Bohème," directed by Baz Luhrmann with a score by some Puccini guy, don't begin at the Broadway Theater until next Friday, but thanks to a surprisingly early and coordinated publicity campaign, a casual observer could be excused for thinking the show had already opened and received a round of rave reviews. (How many Tonys did it win again?)

Put simply, "La Bohème" is everywhere. The show has already begun an ample print campaign and, more surprising for Broadway, preopening television advertising, showing a glossy spot directed by Mr. Luhrmann himself in his television advertising debut. (If it looked familiar, it should; to keep costs low, Mr. Luhrmann used the same computerized images of Paris created for his film "Moulin Rouge.")

On Monday, the director and many on the show's creative team held court at a jammed news conference at the Millennium Hotel, an event that drew 125 reporters from around the world and across the Net. Many were playing catch-up; Mr. Luhrmann and his show had already been the subject of a flattering segment on "Today" (is there any other kind on "Today"?) as well as articles in Newsweek, Vanity Fair and Vogue, which gave "La Bohème" an eight-page photo spread to accompany Mr. Luhrmann's personal diary of the show's progress.

Then there's the cross-marketing. Catherine Martin, Mr. Luhrmann's wife and chief designer, has struck a deal with Montblanc, the luxury goods maker, to design boutique displays in a "Bohème" style for 49 shops nationwide, an arrangement that also has a Montblanc sign noticeably placed in the set design. (Piper-Heidsieck champagne is also represented.) Montblanc is returning the favor by sending out fliers to 20,000 customers, presumably the types who like opera and really nice pens.

One reason for the blitz is obvious: "La Bohème," reset in 1957 Paris, is not an easy sell. It's facing two obvious hurdles: it's an opera, and it's in Italian. (It will feature snappy surtitles in 1950's vernacular.) The show, which sold out its tryout run in San Francisco, is said to have a $3 million advance coming into previews, a respectable if not staggering figure for a $6.5 million musical. Crucial to the producers' hopes - beyond Mr. Luhrmann and Ms. Martin's big-time talents - is an effort to draw the young audiences who favor Mr. Luhrmann's hipster style.

"We're looking for a nontraditional opera audience and a nontraditional Broadway audience," Mr. Luhrmann said.

The "Bohème" push may also just be a sign that Broadway is becoming more attuned to marketing. "Movin' Out," a confirmed hit, used many of the same stratagems, including an early television advertising presence and cross-marketing.

For his part, despite his good reviews in San Francisco and good buzz here, Mr. Luhrmann says he's not taking anything for granted.

"Whatever the perception, it's a big house to fill, and we're doing an Italian opera in Italian on Broadway," he said. "So we're out there doing whatever we can to give it a chance."

________________________________

Director Brings Opera to Broadway
By Michael Kuchwara, AP Drama Writer, The Herald Tribune
20 November 2002

NEW YORK (AP) - Baz Luhrmann is upfront about the challenge: "Bringing Italian opera to Broadway is not the easiest way to have a hit," he says with a laugh.

"I'm used to it. Everything I've ever made has been an enormous risk - with people saying, `Are you crazy?' I'm not that heroic or brave. But there are things that for very personal and vivid reasons I want to go and do."

The 40-year-old Australian director already has made a name for himself with such films as the high-energy "Strictly Ballroom," a punkish, pop-flavored "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" and the even more wildly extravagant "Moulin Rouge."

Now, he's coming to New York with a $6.5 million, populist production of "La Bohème," plunked down in 1950s Paris, sung in the original Italian (with English surtitles) and starring a cast of youthful, sexy singers who could surprise both opera purists and Broadway show folk.

"`La Bohème' really was the television of its time - it plays to the child and to the adult," the director states emphatically. "And if you are looking to play to everyone, you are not going to find them in a state theater or an opera house, you are going to find them on Broadway."

Opera has had an odd, fitful history on Broadway.

Disney's pop version of "Aida," with a score by Elton John and Tim Rice, has been a considerable hit, still running after more than two years. But then, there was "My Darlin' Aida" (1952), which time-traveled Verdi's melodies to the Confederacy of the Civil War. It lasted three months.

Contemporary opera composers have had mixed success. Gian Carlo Menotti scored with two productions - a double bill of "The Telephone" and "The Medium" (1947) which ran for over 200 performances and "The Consul," (1950) which lasted for eight months and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle prize for best musical of the season.

Kurt Weill's "Street Scene" (1947) and Marc Blitzstein's "Regina," based on "The Little Foxes," both flopped on Broadway, but later had runs in opera houses around the world.

Producers hope "La Bohème" will do better. Advance ticket sales are strong, although the producers declined to reveal exact figures. They started to climb after the theater's box office opened in October and after television stations in the New York area began showing a very stylized, 30-second commercial directed by Luhrmann, his first.

Luhrmann sits in the minimalist penthouse of a midtown Manhattan hotel, whose spartan decor can only be described as mausoleum chic. Lighted votive candles on the floor next to a fireplace give a vaguely monastic feel to the room.

The boyish director, sporting unruly blond hair, supplies his own ebullience. Dressed in the ubiquitous black - black pants, black jacket and black shoes - plus a formal white shirt and the required white T-shirt peeking through, he radiates a confidence that is disarming.

But then, a conversation with Luhrmann does not suffer from silences. Ask a question and he's off and running, sometimes in several directions at once. In a flash, you understand and appreciate where all the exuberant excesses of "Moulin Rouge" came from.


The director has been obsessed with "La Bohème" for a long time. He staged it in Australia at the Sydney Opera House in 1990. It was that version producers Jeffrey Seller and Kevin McCollum saw on American public television when they were working on another version of Puccini's opera, a little something called "Rent."

"They used it as an example of how `Rent' should be," Luhrmann said.

"I agreed that we should revisit `La Bohème' and deal with the issue that we began with years ago, which is, addressing this work as if it were being done for the first time."

So far, the results have been encouraging. The production was rapturously received during its fall tryout in San Francisco by both critics and audiences. It quickly sold out, and Luhrmann was pleased by the people he reached. Some two-thirds were nonoperagoers.

"There was no demographic," he said. "One of the beautiful things happening was fathers taking their kids and telling them the story. But then, there were groovy, young 18-year-olds, people on date nights, and lots of old ladies, in the audience, too."

But that hasn't stopped the perfectionist Luhrmann from fine-tuning the show, which has settings designed by his wife, Catherine Martin, a woman he refers to affectionately in conversation as C.M.

So he's spending much of his time here at the Broadway Theatre, where "La Bohème" begins preview performances Nov. 29, in preparation for an opening on Dec. 8.

It took him two years to find the right cast for Puccini's tale of starving artists and doomed romance in late 19th-century Paris. Luhrmann's staff auditioned more than 2,000 singers in London, New York and Milan, Italy.

"I worked with 200 singers myself," he says, before settling on the three sets of Mimis and Rodolfos who star in the production. "It nearly wiped me out.

"These are not big-voiced, mature performers, but I did have three requirements: one, that they could sing it; two, that they could act it; and three, that they looked like the characters.

"And what I did do, because I didn't want them to have a generic look, was make sure they didn't look alike. For example, one Rodolfo is 6-foot-tall and blond, classically romantic; another is very James Dean-like and energetic. They give quite different interpretations. They deliver the same promise but with a different nuance."

And in San Francisco, Luhrmann said, the production received exactly the same enthusiastic reception, no matter who performed.

What will opera purists think, especially since the size of the orchestra has been reduced to accommodate Broadway's stringent economics? Luhrmann is unfazed.

"It is a smaller orchestra," he said, "but Puccini did reductions anyway to go on tour. "We haven't cut a single note. The music director is conducting the score more like Toscanini did with the original. Toscanini and Puccini were all about the rhythm of real life.

"What makes great theater doesn't necessarily make a great recording. As records became more about the voices - and consequently slower - every note was made beautiful, as opposed to a piece of theater. By going back to that, we've made the piece more rambunctious, more alive. People can't believe how quickly it goes by."

Luhrmann projects an evangelistic spirit as he warms to talking about how he works.

"At first, these things are my personal gesture," he says. But then, he talks and talks and talks things out with his wife "because she is my soul mate. Finally, though, I have to make the decision because I am the captain."

After "La Bohème" opens, Luhrmann plans to take some time off before plunging ahead next year with a new project - his film about Alexander the Great, a movie he has been planning for a decade. Plus there are stage versions of both "Strictly Ballroom" and "Moulin Rouge" in the works. But don't look for them any time soon. "I don't rush things."

With homes in Sydney and New York and his own production company, Bazmark, Inc., Luhrmann doesn't need to worry about money and has confidently turned down a lot of projects.

"I'm not exactly like Disney, more like the Diaghilev Ballet," he said with a laugh. "There are things that I would like to do, but ultimately I end up doing the things I need to do artistically."

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On B'way, no Baz like show Baz
By John Clark, The Daily News
20 November 2002

Baz Luhrmann is a lot like the movies he's directed ("Strictly Ballroom," "Romeo + Juliet," "Moulin Rouge").

He is smart, brash, almost messianic.

Luhrmann also has more than a little bit of the impresario in him. He's going to show you something you've never seen before - or, if you have, he is going to show it to you in a totally new way.

As he says about himself and his wife, Catherine Martin, who is the production designer on all his projects, "I think the singular truth is that my work, and therefore her work, is inseparable from our life."

"We both enjoy each other's conversation, whether it's about what we're going to eat for lunch or what we're going to do on a show," says Martin (see story page 60), who adds that Luhrmann's particular genius is his ability to get creative people and financiers to follow him.

Luhrmann's latest undertaking is a New York production of the venerable Puccini opera "La Bohème," opening Dec. 8 at the Broadway Theater. Audaciously, in typical Luhrmann fashion, this is a Broadway production, which means that roles normally sung once or twice a week are sung eight times.

To accommodate this grueling schedule, he cast three separate sets of singers, who perform on a rotating basis. Just as important, he had to accommodate the demands of the box office - he had to make opera commercial.

"The issue was how to open a door for an audience who perhaps doesn't understand that guys running around in large velvet floppy hats and checked pants and beards like ZZ Top are bohemian," Luhrmann says.

In other words, he had to figure out how to lure non-fans of opera, since the narrow operagoing demographic could hardly fill those seats night after night. So he updated this tale of young lovers in the Parisian demimonde of the 1830s to the Paris of 1957 - a socioeconomic fit, he says.

This is not the first time the 40-year-old Australian director has updated "La Bohème," having originally staged a controversial, hit production at the Sydney Opera House in 1990.

It was near Sydney, in the tiny town of Herron's Creek, that he grew up. Baz (his given name is Mark) is a nickname bestowed by his father, who worked variously as a pig farmer, inventor and operator of a gas station and a movie theater. His mother worked as a ballroom-dance instructor in Sydney after splitting from his father - helping to inspire his 1992 movie, "Strictly Ballroom." Luhrmann went to drama school in Sydney, where he met his future wife when staging a student opera.

Luhrmann says producers in New York expressed interest in his 1990 "La Bohème," but he didn't pursue it. He restaged the opera in 1993, when it was filmed and later shown in this country on PBS, and once more in 1996. Again, he was approached about bringing it to New York - but he was busy in Australia.

He was producing records. He was a guest-editor for several magazines. He says he even joined Prime Minister Paul Keating's then-floundering 1993 reelection campaign and helped him win. (Keating was defeated three years later.)

The only thing he and his wife, nicknamed C.M., didn't do was go to Hollywood.

"I guess in our youthful, bohemian idealist stupidity, we were very strong about saying, 'We'll take less money, but we need to work in Australia,'" he says. "So over those 10 years we've managed to have a really great studio built. We made 'Moulin Rouge' there. So we played from Australia for the globe. But we traveled endlessly."

Which is one reason he is staging "La Bohème" in New York: He wants to make this city his home. He's tired of traveling.

While it has taken the production two years to get to Broadway, its profile - and maybe its prospects - has been elevated by "Moulin Rouge," the 2001 film that proved he could revive the movie musical (even as 1996's "Romeo + Juliet" proved he could remake Shakespeare for the MTV generation). The film, which starred Nicole Kidman, won two Oscars, for Best Costumes and Best Art Direction .

Not everyone loved "Moulin Rouge." Some found that Luhrmann's approach, while it may have popular appeal, smothers the material. In his review of "Moulin Rouge," L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan quoted an actor as saying, "We never heard from Baz to turn it down. It was always, 'More! More!'" Turan continues: "The director even sent a note to his cast, reading, 'I dare you to make me say you've gone too far.'"

In his defense, Luhrmann says Shakespeare was considered a hack in his day and that "La Bohème," written in 1896, was that era's "Sex and the City." While not exactly addressing the complaint that his productions are more Luhrmann (and Martin) than they are Shakespeare or Puccini, he is making the larger point that he's giving these artists and their works back to the public.

"As [composer] Benjamin Britten said, 'If anything is any good, it will be done in many different ways at many different times in many different places,'" Luhrmann says.

Not surprisingly, Luhrmann is more concerned with the audience response than he is with the critical one. He hopes the show runs at least through March.

Meanwhile, he's off to Morocco in a few weeks to begin building sets for the epic film "Alexander the Great," which he hopes will star Leonardo DiCaprio.

Other projects on the drawing board are stagings of "Strictly Ballroom" and "Moulin Rouge."

"I have endless treatments of works that I want to do," Luhrmann says. "I'll never live long enough to do all of them."

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Bohemian Rhapsody
Catherine Martin revives '50s fashion in the Broadway version of 'La Bohème'
By Alev Aktar, New York Daily News
20 November 2002

In addition to her considerable design talents, Catherine Martin has great timing.

When she created the fin-de-siècle costumes for "Moulin Rouge," it just so happened that designers already were pushing bustiers, crinoline skirts and fishnet stockings. But it was Martin's version of them (helped by Nicole Kidman's luminous beauty and Vogue's extensive coverage of her corseted cleavage) that made cancan couture one of the biggest trends last year.

Now Martin is bringing back 1950s fashion in a new version of "La Bohème," directed by husband Baz Luhrmann and opening Dec. 8 at the Broadway Theater. And once again, it comes at a time when Seventh Ave., from Marc Jacobs to Donna Karan, is mining the same decade for inspiration.

"It's a happy coincidence," said Martin, 37, a purposeful blond who created the costumes (with Angus Strathie) as well as the black-and-white sets accented with bursts of color. "Everything is '50s at the moment. If you go into Club Monaco, there certainly is '50s influence in the shape of the skirts and the look. It might be that Baz does have an ability to feel what's happening at a given moment."

Luhrmann and Martin first staged the Puccini classic at the Sydney Opera House in 1990. At the time, they debated whether to keep the love story in the 1830s - its original setting - when women wore "difficult" high-waisted Little Bo Peep dresses.

Then Martin stumbled on some black-and-white postcards with photographic images by Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others. They prompted her and Luhrmann to place the opera in 1957 Paris, partly for esthetic reasons, but also because of the hidden complexity of the era.

"It's the spirit of a kind of a halcyon day, when things were more simple, everything was more beautiful," says Martin. "We ignore the fact that there were civil-rights issues - it was very difficult to be gay; if you were a woman, things were possibly more complicated than they are for you today."

Sally Singer, fashion news/features director at Vogue, describes the style as "extremely cool." "The look of the clothes is incredible with a sort of 1957 American-in-Paris vibe. It's a time when men looked like men and women looked like women. It's a fantastic period and one that has been underrepresented in fashion because we've spent a lot of time making everything look low-slung."

Next stop, Broadway

When Luhrmann and decided to bring the production to New York, after a stint in San Francisco, Martin created completely new costumes and scenery.

She and her husband have an unusual working relationship, in which he stays abreast of every cuff and collar.

"Baz has a very clear philosophical and research structure for us to work in," explained Martin. "Then we have a series of presentations and ideas go backwards and forwards. It's all a process of conversation, and he is very involved and interested in every single detail - sometimes, to the point where you want to kill yourself. You just think, 'Enough already with the buttons!' But that's why the work looks so good - because he forces you to be on your game."

When it came to modernizing "La Bohème," Martin first researched her subject thoroughly. "We looked at books, we went to the Met and looked at 10 or so pieces out of the Dior collection, we went through thousands of archival photos."

Then, Martin, whose nickname is C.M., took the characters' financial straits into consideration. "You're got to remember that our '50s is meant to be the real '50s - they're wearing knockoffs, not couture. We are very much about what girls could buy in department stores. Mimi [the doomed love interest] is a poor girl, and already we are stretching the bounds of poverty.

"Angus and I have possibly snuck in some slightly more upscale details, because we can't resist," she added with a laugh. "Somebody mentioned that she only has two outfits, but she has four pairs of really great shoes. I said, 'That comes from a shoe fetishist designing her wardrobe!'"

Film buffs

Luhrmann has described the visual references in "La Bohème" as "absolutely, unashamedly cinematic" - a little James Dean, a bit of Marlon Brando. Thwarted lover Rodolfo gets a black motorcycle jacket à la Brando, while flirty Musetta dons a show-stopping red-satin cocktail dress similar to ones worn by Audrey Hepburn. Mimi wears a trench coat - good news for Burberry.

The costumes' colors harmonize along with the characters, who are played by three sets of singers (so they can rest their voices between performances). Mimi, for example, wears a purple dress that matches Rodolfo's purple coat.

There's even a raspberry beret - a nod to Prince perhaps? - that plays a part in the romance between Rodolfo and Mimi.

But ultimately, no matter how beautiful and meaningful C.M.'s costumes are, they will need to be carried by performers as powerful as Kidman.

"It's the force of the personality of the actor, their mystique, their charisma, that pushes the clothes beyond just being things on a hanger that look nice," explains Martin. "The clothes are secondary."

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Baz, the apple of New York's eye
By Caroline Overington, New York - featured in The Age Newspaper
20 November 2002

New York is excited about Baz Luhrmann.

The Australian, and his wife, Catherine Martin, are preparing a dazzling new production of La Bohème to open on Broadway in December. They are also working on the $US160 million epic Alexander the Great, with Leonardo di Caprio in the lead and 5000 soldiers, borrowed from a Moroccan king, in the cast.

And notwithstanding two Academy Awards for Moulin Rouge, the golden couple feel they are yet to reach their peak.

"You always hope you will continue to grow," says Luhrmann. "There are people, like Orson Welles, whose first great work was untoppable. I don't see that I've reached any kind of peak. I still have ideas."

Luhrmann is speaking in a room at the Millennium Hotel, full of journalists flown in from around the globe to hear about La Bohème, which Luhrmann describes as a "farewell kiss" to his own youth; he turned 40 during rehearsals.

The first time he staged La Bohème, for the Australian Opera at the Sydney Opera House, he was 25 years old and living his own, bohemian life. Now he is married, thinking of starting a family, and feeling his age, he says.

"Before I turned 40, I was pesky and annoying, with brash ideas that people said would never work. Now I am 40 I can have my ideas, and nobody is allowed to write you off."

Luhrmann and Martin have been collaborating since 1987 and married in 1997. Before Moulin Rouge, they made Strictly Ballroom together, and Romeo and Juliet.

Luhrmann is one of a few key, creative people in the entertainment world who believe that you don't need a lot of money to put on a good show.

"If you want to make Titanic of course, you can spend $100 million. But you can also have one very good actor sitting on a chair on a stage, telling the story, and if he is good storyteller, you'll be able to hear the water, feel the emotion. It's not about money. It's about the concept. Money does not make you creative."

He decided to set this production of La Bohème in Paris in 1957. "But not just for the sake of being groovy. I am actually opposed to doing what I call 'doing Hamlet in Hawaii', doing something just for the sake of being different," he says.

It was good for the characters, it made for a great stage, and 1957 was also the year that broad inoculation for tuberculosis became available, he says, so there was the chance that the tragic seamstress, Mimi, might die, but also a chance that she might live.

Luhrmann also decided the opera must be in Italian, because otherwise, "you compromise and undermine the music".

The couple have been so successful for so long, that he accepts he is "due for a turkey" but doesn't think La Bohème is it. "Maybe that is something for the future."

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Luhrmann Explains Why His Bway La Bohème Is Set in 1957
By Kenneth Jones, Playbill Online
20 November 2002

Baz Luhrmann's Broadway staging of Puccini's La Bohème is not set in the 1840s Paris of the 1896 opera, but in 1957 Paris - a time of artistic experimentation, World War II kids coming of age and inoculation from disease.

Why does Luhrmann set the production in the era of artist Jackson Pollock, who is conjured in the opening scene, when Marcello splatters paint on a canvas?

"For all the talk that this is another wacky Baz Luhrmann groovy show, all decisions are based on revelation of character, revelation of plot," Luhrmann told Playbill On Line. "We wanted to make it as much like the experience Puccini's audience would have had in the 1890s. A lot of the humor [back then] had to do with an understanding of the characters - what a bohemian of the 1840s was. The 1840s bohemian basically got around in large, velvet, floppy hats and checked pants and beards like ZZ Top. It might be difficult and an unnecessary burden to decode for a contemporary audience what that is, so we wanted to see: Could we re-set it in a bohemia that could be more accessible?"

Luhrmann said it helped that his designer-wife, Catherine Martin's father is a professor of French history and that her mother is French.

"We spent a lot of time in Paris, living the bohemian life and researching all different periods of bohemia, and found that '57 was a good social-economic match [with the 1840s bohemian life]," Luhrmann said. "And indeed, the bohemian of the 1840s was [living in a] post-war time . Louis Philippe was a boring king but a good one, and so the bourgeoisie flourished. Their kids were rebelling without cause: There were non-politicized bohemians. And '57 was a time again when you had this sort of non politicized bohemia."

And what of the sickness of Mimi in 1957? Is she tubercular?

"[1957] was also the year in which broad inoculation for tuberculosis took place," Luhrmann said. "Clearly, this being a primary plot point, there has to be a reasonable amount of credibility that [Mimi] died from tuberculosis. For those reasons, '57 became our year. It wasn't like, 'Gee, don't people look great in leather jackets?' Much as they do look good, it's not my favorite visual period, the '50s. My favorite things are irrelevant to me. My taste is irrelevant. It's about decoding the work and revealing the power of that to the audience."

Previews for the Broadway staging of the production that caused a sensation in Australia in 1990 (and in revival in 1993 and 1996) begin Nov. 29 at the Broadway Theatre. Opening is set for Dec. 8. For ticket information, call (212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250.

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Luhrmann wooing B'way (no link)
'Bohème' designer, performers, producers to speak to journos
By Robert Hofler, Variety
12 November 2002

NEW YORK -- Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to bring some savvy Hollywood press pizzazz to staid old Broadway.

Making his legit debut here, the director of "Moulin Rouge" is promoting his incoming stage production of "La Bohème" with a movie-style media junket, complete with print-and-radio round tables and back-to-back mini interviews for TV journalists. A staggering 200 reporters are invited for Monday's press fest in Gotham. "La Bohème" opens Dec. 8.

Can Broadway cope with this much attention, this much hype?

Press junkets are so standard in movieland that they've been spoofed in the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts starrer "Notting Hill" and scorned in a recent New Yorker profile on praiser Bumble Ward.

But Broadway lives in an alternative entertainment universe.

"I thought I'd made up the concept of doing all these interviews," said "La Bohème" publicist Chris Boneau. "Then it hit me: This is a tried-and-true approach."

But not on Broadway and certainly never on this scale.

Come Monday, Luhrmann and his Oscar-winning wife, designer Catherine Martin, will rotate with the principal performers and producers of "La Bohème" to give group interviews to print and radio reporters. Thrown in the mix is a general news conference as well as several brief one-on-one interviews with TV reporters.

While lunch will be provided, that's where the freebies stop. Traditionally, movie companies pay for certain journalists' air travel, hotel and related expenses.

"The reporters we've invited are either based here," said Boneau, "or they're getting to New York on their own accord."

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The Look of Love
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By Stacey D'Erasmo, New York Times
3 November 2002
(Images featured in this article can be found on the Miscellaneous Images page.)

There are four clocks on the wall of the SoHo loft that serves as a base of operations for the newest opera to come to Broadway. One is marked Sydney; one, New York; one, London; and one is unmarked -- Art's eternal time, perhaps. Beneath the clocks, teams of artisans are hovering over costume sketches, set models, numerous computer screens and drafting tables; the phone is ringing; delivery people are arriving; and long white curtains are billowing glamorously in the breeze. A very supersonic Trevi coffee machine stands waiting in the kitchen to produce espresso for anyone who might need one -- possibly every person in this loft, since they are in the last, frenzied days before taking Baz Luhrmann's production of ''La Bohème'' first to San Francisco for tryouts in October and then, on Dec. 8, to the Broadway Theater in New York.

Dark models of the stage set, looking like Goth doll houses, sit at the back of the loft. On one wall, head shots of the cast members have been digitally scanned onto each costume sketch so that three-dimensional faces appear, eerily, to be peering out from two-dimensional drawings. On another wall, snapshots of chorus members say things like ''Sister Sledge A -- Simone de Beauvoir B,'' indicating, somewhat inscrutably, the look of the two roles each actor will each play. The sense that you have fallen down the rabbit hole into some Wonderland workshop is strong.

The woman overseeing all this productive commotion is Catherine Martin, Luhrmann's longtime production designer and, since 1997, his wife, known to all as C.M. A short, blond woman wearing a black-and-white circle skirt, white Birkenstocks and a faintly worried expression, she is not the most dramatic person in view. But she is definitely the one most in motion, tacking from station to station, eating toast, drinking cappuccino and dispensing Australian-accented instructions. She briskly plucks a ruler out of the hands of a young designer. She stops at a bank of computers and queries a young man about their RAM. She shows a series of set photos to a designer and offers her own tentative assessment. ''It kind of works,'' C.M. says uneasily, ''especially when you have gauze on top of it.'' It can be easy to lose sight of C.M. as she darts amid the darkly draped but madly active Paris of the sets. Wonderland is so endlessly fascinating -- maybe that's the time zone of the unmarked clock -- that you might have to adjust your eyes to see the fast-moving, determined Alice in Birkenstocks at the center. She is, after all, the one who built it all.

It is a paradox of production design that it is simultaneously highly visible and invisible. No one who saw ''Moulin Rouge,'' however, could possibly have missed Martin's contribution. It outdazzled every other movie in recent history with a dense painterly bricolage that resembled an over-the-top Coney Island of the heart, exploding from one multilayered motif to the next and the next, from the Toulousian gaiety of the can-can hall to the psychedelic wackiness of the bohemian artists' garret to the innumerable rose-colored spangles of the Bollywood musical numbers. Though it threatened at every turn to topple into chaos, the overall effect was a deeply moving visual essay about love among the ruins of modernity for our very, very visually literate moment. In fact, the very heaping-up of visual cliches -- Nicole Kidman's red dress, the Paris rooftops -- miraculously produced authentic emotion, and for a flickering instant, you, like the film's artistes, could actually believe in ''truth, beauty, freedom and love.''

By taking her artistry to a place that moviegoers had never been, or seen, Martin brought front and center a question lurking behind the scenes of all production design: if a film's look -- the costumes and the sets and the makeup and the razzle-dazzle -- is its most memorable quality, then who deserves credit, the director or the production designer? At the last Academy Awards, ''Moulin Rouge'' was a dark-horse nominee for Best Picture. But it was Martin, not Luhrmann, who won -- twice, in fact: once for art direction and once, in an award she shared with Angus Strathie, for costume design. Still, wasn't it all in some sense the product of Luhrmann's vision? The answer, actually, is yes and no. ''I concretize the abstract,'' Martin explains when she stops moving for a minute. ''Baz has more ideas than anyone I've ever met. Sometimes I find Baz's number of ideas overwhelming, and I want to go to bed for a year. Sometimes, though, I find the norm so stifling, and I say, 'No, we do what we want to do, within parameters.'''

Luhrmann and Martin have been collaborating since 1987, when, as a young artistic director in search of a designer, he spotted her work at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. The daughter of a professor of French literature and a math teacher, she had dropped out of fine art school because, she says, ''I realized I didn't have any ideas,'' but as a designer she was fluid, experimental, into ''alienation and happenings.'' Strathie, who was Martin's classmate at the time, fondly describes her student persona as ''magnetic,'' and ''a little bit mad. She used to wear red-frame glasses with red lipstick and she didn't care if her clothes were on the right way or not.''

Luhrmann was impressed by the radical set design she proposed for ''Lulu'': a huge smashed chandelier occupying a concrete boxlike stage. ''It was a great concept,'' he says, though he allows that ''there might have been a few staging issues.'' He generally comes across as a dreamy boy, prone to talk of metaphorical ''journeys'' and ''fiery roads,'' but he says that she ''is the realist part of the dial, with me spinning on the other end of it.'' In their first collaboration, the opera ''Lake Lost,'' he says, ''we took a film studio, filled it with water eight inches deep and drove Mazdas on it.'' In the habit of renaming the many people in his orbit, Luhrmann christened Martin C.M. And along the way, they fell in love. Luhrmann, the romantic, says that they had their first long, intense conversation in his King's Cross apartment over a brothel. C.M., the realist, recalls, ''I think it was over a restaurant,'' adding politely, ''but it might have been next door to a brothel.''

Luhrmann was offered the chance to stage ''La Bohème'' for the Australian Opera, with the instruction to make Puccini's old warhorse fresh enough to attract his own generation. While Luhrmann, undeterred, talked a lot about ''revealing the work,'' C.M. was thinking of her budget of less than $30,000 and the unregenerate fact that ''most of 'Bohème' is two people talking in a room -- a conversational piece about people's love lives.'' The pair began by looking at bohemian life at the time the story was first set. ''At first,'' she says, ''Baz wanted to set it in the 1830's or 40's, but then it was a barrier to people, especially the clothing -- women wore these little bonnets and kind of Little Bo Peep dresses with high waistlines, and men had long beards.'' There was also the problem of bohemianism itself and its well-worn images of artists' garrets and romantic poverty. ''I never want to shy away from a cliche,'' she says, ''because cliches are often the truest way to say anything.'' But, ''there was very little you could do with the poor old garret. People said it could be 80's high-concept, but I said, 'This is not the show to be getting all conceptual.'''

Meanwhile, they talked -- and talked and talked. ''My job,'' Luhrmann says confidently, ''is to have the big ideas, and hers is to solve them through her extraordinary gift and craft.'' The sometimes volatile division of creative labor that the two have developed is something he discusses with apparent relish. ''I'm a process nutbag,'' he admits.

In this case, the process started out as an extended philosophical conversation about, as Luhrmann puts it, ''that part of our soul that's human and romantic.'' How could Paris, called romantic so many times it no longer meant anything, seem anything but sentimental? How could opera, the popular entertainment of 1896, be fresh a century later? What about Orpheus, Luhrmann's guiding myth? And then there was the question of overt theatricality -- another favored Luhrmann device -- and the need, as C.M. says, ''to find the unexpected in the expected.'' It was an Orphian task indeed: how to bring ''La Bohème'' back to life, and cheaply to boot?

Around the corner from where they lived, she ran across a rack of postcards of 1950's Paris by Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson and others. Goodbye, Little Bo Peep; hello, 1950's Left Bank. Just to make sure, she wrote to the Pasteur Institute to inquire whether tuberculosis could still