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Preview
Rent-La Bohème at Baldwin-Wallace Part I: a conversation with stage director Victoria Bussert

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by Daniel Hathaway

Giacomo Puccini's most popular opera, La Bohème, premiered on February 1, 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin. Just a few days short of a century later, Jonathan Larson's Rent, the rock opera based on La Bohème, had its first off-Broadway performance on January 25, 1996.

Both versions of Henri Murger's novel, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, have been wildly successful. Rent closed its twelve year, 5,125 performance run on Broadway in September, 2008 and has lived on through national tours, foreign productions and a film. La Bohème remains one of the most frequently performed operas in North America, logging some 300 productions between 1996 and 2006.

Beginning on February 15 and continuing through February 27, Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory will produce both shows in repertory for the first time anywhere, and both of them are directed by Victoria Bussert. In a telephone conversation during a B-W "snow day", we asked Vicky why nobody had ever staged this obvious pairing before?

"The idea was actually hatched fifteen years ago when I taught my very first class at B-W — a combination of music theatre and vocal performance majors. Because they had so few of both of them at that time, they put them all together in one class. After maybe the first two weeks, I thought to myself, wow — these kids are really good. You know what would be fun... "

But great ideas sometimes have to be put on hold for practical reasons. In this case, the rights for college and university productions of Rent didn't become available until June, 2009. When that golden moment arrived, Vicky Bussert leapt at the opportunity. "I was directing at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival when that finally happened and within five minutes, I was on the phone to (conservatory director) Peter Landgren".

Having secured the rights, the project went into fifteen months of planning and pre-production, including the search for music directors. Vicky recalls how B-W snagged veteran maestro Constantine Kitsopoulos to conduct La Bohème. "My husband is a music director on Broadway — he conducted Les Mis for five years — and he knew Constantine, who had directed the Broadway production of La Bohème. I e-mailed Constantine to ask if he had an assistant or somebody he knew who had a connection with that production who might find it interesting to do this with our students. He got back to me later that day and said 'I want to do it!' I almost fell over. I was so excited that our students would have his sort of expertise."

The music director for Rent came right out of the B-W student population. "Ryan Garrett was accepted to B-W as a performer (it's very difficult to get in: we audition 250 kids from around the country and take only 15). He was talented enough to enter as a singer, but we knew he was a composer and had done music directing. It took him all of one semester to decide he wanted to be a music director here. We sent Ryan to New York and he sat in the pit for Mary Poppins and shadowed Phantom. Every year we have tried to increase the number of his projects and their complexity. He's racked up a lot of credits. He's an extraordinary young man."

Besides being a fun theatrical project, Rent/Bohème serves an important educational function for students and audiences alike. "Most music theatre programs reside in theatre departments and they're BFA degrees. Our music theatre program is a Bachelor of Music degree. Because music theatre is one of the newer music degrees, I think there's a period of adjustment during which we have to figure out how music theatre majors and vocal performance majors operate at the same time in a music conservatory. How do we as artists learn to appreciate each other's art form? I thought about what Puccini did with Murger, and what Jonathan Larson did with Puccini — they were inspired by each other and developed the themes in their own art forms. You know, most people who love La Bohème haven't seen Rent, and most people who adore Rent don't know Puccini at all. I'm actually a director who did La Bohème before, and I love both of these art forms to my core. Now, the Bohème cast has watched Rent runthroughs and the Rent cast has watched Bohème runthroughs, and the idea of staging them on the same bones of a set allows me to treat the parallels between the two pieces with the same staging”.

Those parallels are extensive and have been imaginatively developed in the two productions. "When Mimi comes in in Bohème and asks Rodolfo to light her candle, it's exactly the same entrance as Mimi in Rent. We have these parallels in both pieces that you would only get to see if you saw these two pieces side by side. I think it reinforces how spectacular the inspiration was for Jonathan Larson and the respect he had for what Puccini has done. You know, he quotes 'Musetta's Waltz' throughout Rent — there are so many direct parallels between the two pieces, and the layering is extraordinary: in Bohème, Parpignol is out there selling toys to attract all the children and in Rent, there's a drug dealer looking to attract people in a parallel scene".

What is Vicky Bussert's overall concept for Bohème? "Jonathan Larson moved his scenes into the 1990's because he found such parallels with the lives of the artists. I had always wanted to set a Bohème in Paris of the 1930's based on Brassaï's photographs. I kept waiting for my next Bohème to be able to do that, then when Rent became available, I thought, well, that's really interesting because realistically, there are things that could exist in Paris of the 1930's and New York of the 1990s. Like Colline's coat, which he sells. That could end up in a flea market in New York and become the coat that Angel Schunard buys for Tom Collins. By putting Bohème into the 1930s, we were able to find little touches like that. The waiter and the busboy in La Bohème are the waiter and the busboy in Rent, and in my mind they're like the grandchildren of the characters in La Bohème. Because we have had this long rehearsal period — one week on Bohème, one week on Rent since September (I've never had a piece I've been able to rehearse over this amount of time) — I get to continue to add little layers, little, fun touches for anyone who sees the shows back to back. What most people don't know is that Jonathan Larson actually includes Murger's name in a very funny moment in Act I. I'm challenging audiences to listen for that acknowledgement! I want as a director to have the same kind of fun Jonathan Larson did with things like that. For example, at the top of Act III of Bohème, and this is one of my personal favorite moments, when Mimi's scene comes in, which is just played in the orchestra, literally you not only see Mimi of Bohème, but you see the Mimi of Rent, and that's who the Mimi in Bohème asks to go get Marcello. And the Mimi from Bohème makes a very short appearance in Rent. Those may be only little, 30-second moments, but I just love the fact that we can do things like that".

We'll continue our preview of Rent/Bohème next week in conversations with music directors Constantine Kitsopoulos and Ryan Garrett.

The repertory run of Rent/Bohème begins on Tuesday, February 15 with Rent and Wednesday, February 16 with La Bohème. The two works alternate on weekday evenings. On Saturdays and Sundays, both productions can be seen beginning at 2:00 pm and 8:00 pm, and discounted tickets are available for those who want to see both shows in the same day. Check the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings for details.

Photo: Andrea Leach (Maureen in Rent) and Lindsay Espinosa (Musetta in La Bohème), photograph by J. Snider.

 

 

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