LA BOHEME by Giacomo Puccini, directed by John Caird, with Grazia Doronzio, Joyce El-Khoury, Dimitri Pittas, Michael Fabiano, Eric Margiore and Simone Osborne. Presented by the Canadian Opera Company at the Four Seasons Centre (145 Queen West). Opens tonight (Thursday, October 3) and runs in rep with Peter Grimes to October 30. $12-$365. 416-363-8231, coc.ca.
John Caird’s directing credits include two of the biggest stage shows of the last half-century: the behemoth eight-and-a-half-hour Dickens adaptation Nicholas Nickleby, and that most mega of mega-musicals, Les Miserables.
“You don’t know in rehearsal if something will still be running in 30 years,” says the director, in his hotel suite a block from the Four Seasons Centre, where his production of Puccini’s La Boheme goes up tonight.
“Back then, nothing had ever run that long. But we did know we were working on something groundbreaking and special. The problem with such things, however, is that critics and audiences often don’t recognize it. It took time for word-of-mouth to build. Even for Nicholas Nickleby, we were playing to half-empty houses the first three or four weeks.”
That shouldn’t be a problem for the perennially popular Boheme, the tuneful, lushly romantic tragicomedy that chronicles the lives of a group of young bohemians in Paris’s Latin Quarter in the late 19th century.
But there are other challenges that come with a work that some jaded operagoers have seen dozens of times, while newbies might be attending because it inspired the musical Rent.
“I don’t think of audiences in that way,” says the genial, soft-spoken Caird, who was born in Edmonton and grew up there and in Montreal before moving with his parents to England at 10.
“My job is to make a piece like this as real as I can. It’s drawn from a source that is profoundly naturalistic [Henri Murger’s novel], so I had to investigate the original material fully and put the opera on in a way that’s completely believable to an audience, however old, young or musically educated they are.”
Drawing on the fact that many of its characters are struggling artists and students in the now legendary Belle Epoque period, Caird and designer David Farley have got them actively contributing to the look and feel of the production.
“The character Marcello is a painter,” explains Caird, “so he’ll be painting not just within the set but on the set. In the big marketplace cafe scene, he has his easel out and is working on creating that very scene.”
Rodolfo, the tenor lead, is a poet, and Caird has him jotting things down throughout the opera.
“When Mimi first starts describing her life to him, he can’t resist writing down what she’s saying,” says Caird, “and when she’s dying months later, he shows her that he’s incorporated what she’s said into a poem. She’s amazed and touched to see that she’s been immortalized in words.”
Caird is also a respected librettist and would love to see his reworked libretto for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide – a huge hit in the UK – performed in NYC.
And what about the Siegfried And Roy Spectacular, the Vegas show he wrote and directed for the German-American magicians and their lions?
“It was hilarious, unlike anything I’d done before or will do again,” he says. “They’re mad as hatters and in their own world, so getting them to relate to everybody else onstage was a challenge. But the show didn’t need to be dramatically coherent, just eye-popping and extravagant.”
The show also taught him a few tricks he’s used ever since.
“How do you get an elephant to disappear onstage, or get somebody to turn himself into a tiger and make the audience believe it?” he says, laughing. “Misdirection. How things are lit. What you can’t see is more important than what you can.”
Interview Clips
John Caird on how he chooses projects:
On how everything you need to know about an opera is in the score:
On “high-concept opera productions” (with a shoutout to Antoni Cimolino’s The Merchant Of Venice at Stratford):
On getting opera singers to bring out a work’s drama:
On working with famous and not-so-famous performers, and the idea of a theatre company:
glenns@nowtoronto.com | @glennsumi
