Those expecting more of the brilliantly colored, feverishly paced phantasmagoria that Australian director Baz Luhrmann and his designer wife Catherine Martin created for their movie musical, "Moulin Rouge," are in for a big let down. This bare-bones, shadowy production, far from glitzy, is downright gloomy. A huge neon sign, L'Amour, embellishing a Parisian rooftop is the only element Moulin Rouge-ish. The rest of the set, as designed by Ms. Martin and barely lit by Nigel Levings, is subdued and depressingly colorless. Luhrmann's signature cinematic swirl has been slowed down to a sluggish, hand-cranked vehicle with a definite road company feel to it.
Puccini's lush opera has been updated from 19th century to 1957. Its starving artists are transformed from bohemian to beatnik, still inhabiting the time-honored freezing attic apartment. When the scene descends to the busy street below, the production's unrelieved grayness is brightened by a brief kaleidoscopic flash of light. But even the neon signs everywhere, flashing names of famous nightspots, turn harsh as they illuminate sordid activity on balconies between ugly, overblown prostitutes and their corpulent clients. The boisterous street activity is undermined by deception and malevolence as the busty Musetta (Chloe Wright) shamelessly humiliates her unfortunate "date," a rich, buffoonish English gentlemen (William Youmans) duped into picking up the tab for her friends, including her ex-lover Marcello (Ben Davis). So intent is Mr. Luhrmann to invest his youthful cast with energetic hi jinks that "Musetta's Waltz," a musical gem, is almost obscured by their behind-his-back interplay. Not to say this doesn't happen in the traditional opera, but here it seems particularly mean-spirited and, error of errors, distracting, an indication of the director's lack of respect for the music. To further depress, the idyllic, mood-creating rural scene with priests and schoolchildren in the snow in Act II (in which Mimi and Rodolfo reconcile) has been inexplicably replaced by a huge barbed wire fence with refugees at the French/Belgian border.
Basically, the story is about doomed lovers Mimi (Lisa Hopkins, one of three) and Rudolfo (Jesus Garcia, also one of three) who meet in the attic apartment he shares with the painter, Marcello (who was either Eugene Brancoveanu or Ben Davis in this double cast), the philosopher, Colline (Daniel Webb), the musician, Schaunard (Daniel Okulitch), who, when we first meet them, are busy bamboozling the landlord (Adam Grupper) to avoid paying the rent (ah, Rent, the other updated version of La Boheme on Broadway which suddenly, in comparison, seems brilliantly innovative instead of merely offensive, as I previously thought). As a sub-romantic plot Musetta has a turbulent liaison with Marcello. Mimi and Rudolfo fall in love in record time (in this production), break up for confusing reasons (the penalty of a severely edited book), and she dies of tuberculosis at the end of the abbreviated second act. In fact the entire show is over by 10:15, a feat most traditional musicals, let alone operas, have not yet achieved.
And they are doing all this in Italian! Luhrmann has opted to keep his Broadway opera entirely in its original language simply put "because it sounds better that way." Or, perhaps, to make opera novices feel they are getting "the real thing," The recitative, updated to represent bohemian Parisians, circa 1957, with "hip" captions like "Hey, Daddy-o" or even a squeal "OooEeeem" pops up in supertitles everywhere. In contrast, the lyrics to the arias are florid and old- fashioned and totally out of synch with the "hep cat" colloquialisms. (On my recent visit there, the Australians, a generation or two behind us culturally, were just beginning to adapt the word "groovy" into their social lexicon.)
With a truncated libretto and score, the big question is "Why?". What is the point of remounting a treasured opera on a Broadway stage unless there is a significant adaptation? This hybrid version is neither original nor traditional. It is too close to the original opera to avoid comparison and not close enough to musical theater to be accepted by many.
The "Director's Notes" in the program (always a bad sign: if a show needs additional explanation there is a flaw in the production) states the director's motive is "to attract a new, and perhaps younger, audience to opera." But the product offered is artistically meager, jettisoning the very qualities that make opera great, primarily the music. The lush Puccini score is cut, further compromised by a standard sized Broadway band in the pit. The only elements operatic are the beautiful (but uneven) voices of the cast. However, even this attempt at legitimacy is spurious, as they are body miked into a computer which dictates their vocal quality.
A further stress to the imagination and destruction of any pretense of illusion occurs when stagehands weave their way onstage in seemingly endless (which someone timed at 10 minutes) scene changes (fortunately announced as such in supertitles, since many in the audience confused it with intermission, also labeled) laboriously pushing sets by hand as the cast stands idle, without even the musical interlude employed by opera productions. This device, thought by the creative team to make the opera more accessible, might backfire, awful for those spoiled by the Metropolitan Opera's Zeferilli designed production, and certainly an alien concept on Broadway.
It is interesting to note that when Movin' Out opened, a Broadway musical told exclusively through Billy Joel's music and Twyla Tharp's choreography, the show was reviewed by both theater, music and dance critics. No such attention was given to this Broadway opera. Not one music review has surfaced. Is this a reflection of how little emphasis was placed on the music by the show's producers, creators and/or publicists? One might wonder how the orchestrations were changed for the small Broadway band and how that colored the music; how amplification of operatically trained voices affects their sound and vocal technique; how the severe cutting of the score affected the overall storyline.
Perhaps the unprecedented decision of the producers to invite the major tabloids to see the show three times (for each cast) before reviewing provided an opportunity to drive home the show's less obvious virtues, but the audience has a one-shot chance to respond and, unless they are now preconditioned by glowing reviews to experience the prescribed emotions, I wonder if they will be impressed. Both theater and opera need new audiences, but I doubt this anemic hybrid will galvanize either.
