Ertzatz Bohemians
Dunkirk NY – Some notes on the upcoming production of La Bohème I’m directing:
- It is a perpetual puzzle to me how undergraduate students cannot seem to present full-blooded passion on the stage. They learn diction, they learn how to make a sound, they learn how to read music, but they do not seem to be able to translate it into actual human experience. The human journey of the opera seems to escape them. Has social networking replaced actual passion with virtual passion?
- the 2D/3D thing has bitten me in the ass again. I have a very difficult time looking at 2D drawings and translating them in 3D. Not only did I misread the floor plan for Act 2, causing me to have to flip all my staging left to right, but the set we’ve rented cuts the sightlines in our house so sharply that sitting on the wings means you can’t see or hear. All my staging that uses the high crossover in Act 2 now is useless because only about one-third of the crossover is actually usable. Sigh.
- One of these days we will devise a system of production so that I get more than 2 days to adjust staging and the actors have more than 2 days to work with the actual props.
- When directing the children’s chorus, you can’t use examples like “be excited like you are in the playground.” They don’t play in the playground anymore.
- What is so difficult about realizing you’re trying to live in 1838, so that you shouldn’t be making gestures which are current in 2009?
- When you’ve been given the same note four times, shouldn’t you be able to execute it?
- Maybe it’s not passion they are lacking, but a sense of romance.
- Tomorrow will be hell. First piano dress. First time moving the sets in and out of place. First full use of props. I can’t wait.
Let it be said, however, that Puccini is a genius, and I’m glad to get a shot at this work. It’s fabulous, and a chance to really dig into a score like this, even for a musical amateur like myself, is quite an opportunity. -twl
