This week Calien Lewis, dramaturg with Opera Maine will be joining us again to discuss La Boheme. This year, Opera Maine will be presenting La Boheme during their winter performances and Sweeney Todd for their summer performance. Both operas have a relationship with Broadway. Critics can’t seem to agree on whether or not Sweeney Todd is an opera or a musical. Sondheim states, “essentially, the difference, I think, is in the expectation of the audience. Obviously there are differences in terms of performers and how they approach singing in an art form. But primarily an opera is something done in an opera house in front of an opera audience.”
When Rent went to Broadway in 1996, this librarian was a freshman in college. As soon as someone starts saying the words “five hundred,” in my head, I immediately start singing, “525,600 minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?” I’m fairly positive that other “theater kids” from that generation do the same. My mother, an opera enthusiast, told me at the time that Rent was just a modernization of La Boheme. My mind was blown (apparently the song, La Vie Boheme wasn’t a clue). Wikipedia pulls the genesis of Rent from a 1996 New York Times interview with playwright Billy Aronson:
In 1988, playwright Billy Aronson wanted to create “a musical based on Puccini’s La Bohème, in which the luscious splendor of Puccini’s world would be replaced with the coarseness and noise of modern New York.” In 1989, Jonathan Larson, a 29-year-old composer, began collaborating with Aronson on this project, and the two composed together “Santa Fe”, “Splatter” (later re-worked into the song “Rent”), and “I Should Tell You.” Larson suggested setting the play “amid poverty, homelessness, spunky gay life, drag queens and punk” in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, which happened to be down the street from his Greenwich Village apartment. He also came up with the show’s ultimate title (a decision that Aronson was unhappy with, at least until Larson pointed out that “rent” also means torn apart). In 1991, he asked Aronson if he could use Aronson’s original concept and make Rent his own. Larson had ambitious expectations for Rent; his ultimate dream was to write a rock opera “to bring musical theater to the MTV generation”. Aronson and Larson made an agreement that if the show went to Broadway, Aronson would share in the proceeds and be given credit for “original concept & additional lyrics.”
With this relationship between the two genres of theater, I wondered what other plays or musicals evolved from operas. My first thought went to Elton John’s Aida.
In the year 2000, Elton John and longtime collaborator Tim Rice watched their adaptation of Verdi’s opera hit Broadway. The musical won four Tony Awards including Best Original Score.
In 1943, Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones, a musical based on George Bizet’s Carmen and starring Muriel Burrell Smith, hit Broadway. In 1954, Hammerstein adapted the play into a film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. Some of us may even remember watching Carmen on Ice in 1990 starring Katerina Witt in the role of Carmen. We don’t get to learn if Katerina had any kind of singing voice. Instead of searching for that on Youtube, stick with Carmen Jones.
In 1904, Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly premiered in Milan to fairly terrible reviews. Today, the opera is one of the most performed operas in the world. In 1991, Miss Saigon premiers on Broadway and now our American soldier is fighting in the Vietnam War and our geisha is now a South Vietnamese bar girl. Both the opera and the musical were criticized for orientalism and racism, the music of both have definitely become a part of Western culture.
We do hope you will join us this Wednesday, to learn more about the opera of La Boheme and maybe satisfy some curiosities about the “original” Rent.
Be sure to check back here this summer when I explore the question of “Why do humans taste so good?”
posted: , by Raminta Moore