I’m listening to 2 tenors – Philip Lee and Daniel Koek – sing a love duet. It’s O Soave Fanciulla from Puccini’s La Bohème, one of the crucial carried out scenes within the opera repertoire, written for a male and a feminine voice. In our new English-language model, Rodolfo, a tenor position, meets Lucas, a web-based hook-up whose pals have given the nickname Mimi, and who can be sung by a tenor.
Having directed a way more typical Bohème 30 years in the past, I used to be involved that casting two singers of the identical voice sort may flatten the colors and dynamics of the duet. However as we rehearse, Daniel’s Rodolfo turns into a assured, boastful determine susceptible to exaggeration and sentiment, whereas Phil’s Mimi is a tentative, uneasy presence who in the end sees himself and the world with extra mature eyes than his enthusiastic lover. I realise they really have very totally different vocal qualities, which sharpens their distinctive spirits as characters. Two homosexual males singing among the world’s most romantic music to one another brings out a vulnerability and honesty in Daniel and Phil as performers, whereas feeling like a comic book transgression of the unwritten guidelines of opera.
On the finish of the rehearsal, which takes place in a tiny room within the West Finish of London, I take a look at our web site describing this manufacturing as a “queer reinvention” of Puccini and surprise, within the mild of what’s taking place within the rehearsal room, if that’s the appropriate line to take. Phil and Daniel are enjoying the scene so naturally and simply. It’s a political assertion of its personal, I suppose, however not the aggressive problem to heteronormativity that “queering Puccini” may counsel. I name the workplace and we reword the web site.
I used to be 27 once I first directed La Bohème – for Opera East, a middle-scale touring firm. It was my first job as an opera director and I ready furiously, listening to recordings, studying biographies of Puccini and (by no means having realized to learn music) going again and again the dots till I might comply with the rating. As soon as within the rehearsal room, I targeted on my relationship with the singers – would they suppose in the identical approach as actors I used to be used to? – and with the conductor, sitting beside me along with his baton within the air, a determine I’d by no means needed to cope with as a director of latest performs.
Returning to Puccini now, I see that my 27-year-old self had rather a lot in frequent with Rodolfo and Mimi and their bohemian cohort. Again then, I used to be writing an early unproduced play, keeping off calls for for late cost of hire in a really shabby flat. Solely the yr earlier than, I had misplaced my companion to an Aids-related sickness. Why didn’t I see the parallels with Puccini’s story? Too in awe, maybe, of Bohème’s standing as one of many world’s biggest operas, too involved with understanding the technicalities of the music and the staging.
I realise that, simply as I used to be directing my quite typical opera, Jonathan Larson was on the New York Theatre Workshop, growing his response to La Boheme: the musical Hire. In Puccini, Larson had discovered a mannequin for a narrative of his personal expertise, in a approach that I hadn’t. As rehearsals progressed at Opera East, I started to tire of the rating: too sentimental, too manipulative for my Technology X sensibility.
Leaving Bohème behind, I turned my hand to writing a brand new play. A response I believed, on the time, to all that Puccinian sentimentality. However as I return to Mimi and Rodolfo, I see that that play – which proved to be my breakthrough piece, Procuring and Fucking – has all kinds of parallels with Bohème: a bunch of flatmates struggling to pay the payments; the arrival of a troubled however in the end doomed newcomer; the hovering presence of the older man with cash. Spending time rehearsing a chunk – whether or not a a play or an opera – imprints its form and motifs in your thoughts. No shock then, if the ghosts of Bohème inhabit Procuring and Fucking, even when I used to be unaware of it as I wrote.
The textual content and association for our new Bohème is written by Philip Lee, our Mimi, and our musical director, David Eaton. It reduces the piece to 4 central characters, one homosexual couple, one straight, as they navigate falling out and in of affection and in the end confronting mortality. Our early preview audiences giggle readily on the comedian moments however, because the night ends, there’s the sound of sobbing and when the home lights come up, I see that I’m surrounded by teary eyes. My very own are distinctly moist. Maybe it’s the intimacy of the venue, maybe I’ve mellowed with the passage of time. I nonetheless have a lingering suspicion that Puccini is sentimental and manipulative – however La Bohème now touches me deeply. I wait till the viewers has left and sit alone within the theatre, sobbing.
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