Bazis Broadway Bound

摘要

This not your parents' "LA Boheme." 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 notecards 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-Eliza-bethan 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 youg, the poor and the arty.