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Wednesday, February 05, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

NEW YORK -- For all its aspiration to high art, theater is also commerce, nowhere more than in its showiest shop window, Broadway, which, for all its hidebound traditionalism, is always looking for something new to sell. That's one of its most engaging traditions -- its periodic willingness to co-opt other kinds of entertainment to brighten the bottom line.

	Suheir Hammad is among the poets expressing individual perspectives in Russell Simmons "Def Poetry Jam" on Broadway. (Carol Rosegg)

We certainly seem to be in one of these expansive periods. You have to look pretty hard to find straight plays on Broadway (and even harder to find new plays), but crossover attractions proliferate so much that on a recent reviewing trip I might have been someone else. We might as well have sent our music critic to review Baz Luhrmann's lithe and passionate "La Boheme," our pop critic to the aggressive, preening "Def Poetry Jam," our dance critic to Twyla Tharp's "Movin' Out" or our book editor to the literary skirmishing of "Imaginary Friends."

The first two of these are my subjects today, two crossover entertainments designed to appeal to untraditional audiences, arriving on Broadway from the opposite ends of the traditional cultural continuum -- "La Boheme" stepping down from the posh precincts of grand opera, and "Def Poetry Jam" stepping up from street corners and clubs.

'La Boheme'

Actually, for Puccini to move to Broadway isn't a very big step. It's only a century since he was a musical showman with broad popular appeal, working in the "verisimo" style of heightened realism. And hasn't "La Boheme" already taken a longtime lease on Broadway in the updated, grunged down, freshly "verisimo" guise of "Rent"?

No, Broadway is perfectly at home with "La Boheme," and vice versa. But Puccini is not the star -- that nod goes to the inventive Baz Luhrmann and company. Luhrmann is the Australian director who has proved his stylistic depth and flourish along with a command of pop romantic yearning in his movies "Strictly Ballroom," "Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" and "Moulin Rouge." He has opera chops, as well, and the bottom line is simple: As long as you don't boggle at simplistic plot leaps, "La Boheme" makes a lushly satisfying Broadway musical, with its soaring score, winning performances, very theatrical design and masterful sense of stage life.

That design is the work of Luhrmann's key collaborator and wife, Catherine Martin. She uses a palette of whites, blacks and voluptuously modulated grays for the costumes and three distinct settings, allowing just a lurid splash of color in each scene -- most notably the free-standing huge red neon sign advertising L'Amour atop the garret set of Acts 1 and 4 and Musetta's free-flowing red dress amid the street and cafe life of Act 2.

The stunning design is never static, because its artifice is italicized by the visible presence of the stagehands who move and angle it to allow us access. Theatrical convention trains us to regard a set as a frame for reality. Martin caters to this by extending the set out along the audience walls with functional rooms full of life. But at center stage, the visible artifice of stagehands and stage managers frames the key set pieces, making them an additional presence, ratcheting up our pleasurable sense of theatrical make-believe.

Projected subtitles (the show is sung in Italian) do the same, appearing variously above, below and on the set, calling attention to themselves by wittily using different type fonts to distinguish voices and moods.

The production's central motive is to return to Puccini the sense of vivid sensation he created in 1896. So his Paris of the 1840s is updated to 1957 (there are interpolated references to Brando and MGs) and the cast features young, attractive singers who necessarily lack the more developed vocal abilities of established opera stars. They are miked, of course, to the dismay of some music critics who see this "Boheme" as watered down. But in the Broadway context, it feels rich indeed.

Luhrmann and Martin create four distinct theatrical worlds. First is the rooftop garret with its looming "L'Amour," probably a perfume but also, of course, love itself, which hardly needs advertising, given the handsome youth of the cast and the rampant hormones of the story. The second world is the nighttime Left Bank, pulsating with skillfully sprawling life. Third is the dark canvass of the border town where the tale turns tragic -- this has the painterly bleakness of a modern Flemish master, for which special kudos to the lighting artistry of Nigel Levings. Act 4 returns to the same garret for the tragic climax, with the "L'Amour" now darkly ironic, its power off, electric red turned white. The only spot of color is the echo of it in Marcello's painting.

But by Luhrmann's fourth world, I mean, of course, theatricality itself, a continual presence heightening by contrast our emotional response.

Three pairs alternate Rodolfo and Mini while two alternate Marcello and Musetta. I saw Jess Garcia and Lisa Hopkins as the first, Ben Davis and Chloe Wright as the second. Each is persuasive, and the seven other name roles are all solid. But it is the ensemble of 30-plus and the active children's chorus of eight more which, in conjunction with the entire environment, generate most theatrical thrill.

Although the villains are poverty and tuberculosis, "La Boheme" has its contemporary parallels in many an AIDS play, with the same tale of love relationships corroded by despair. Even the young experience death; even young audiences, Luhrmann knows, respond to the full emotion of tragedy.

At Broadway Theatre, 1681 Broadway; call 1-800-432-7250.

'Def Poetry Jam'

Nine standup poets come at us with energy, insistent rhythms and rhymes and loads of attitude. They come from the world of poetry slams, in which mainly young poets of (mainly) color perform with whatever aggression and edge of comedy and outrage that it takes to hold an audience.

By contrast, an attentive Broadway audience must be easy. But judging from a 5 p.m. Saturday matinee, this isn't just the usual Broadway audience, since it's enlivened with the ethnically diverse and young. I am neither of those and I went with a bit of a show-me attitude. I like to hear poetry, but I'm more used to it on the page, and this is a cultural scene I don't know.

But right from the first poem, I did know where I was -- amid the contemporary incarnations of Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman, rhapsodic bards singing their passionate loves and hates, cutting across formal poetic structures with a freewheeling verse heavy on repetition and self-dramatization. The rhymes are more insistent than in the poetry I know, the rhythms more percussive and the performances more hyped up and in your face. These poets hawk their verses with prideful aggression, not sonorous diffidence.

It's fun. And even by strait-laced criteria, some of it is poetry. No, I mean all of it is poetry, but some individual pieces are also what I'd call poems, a value judgment that means I want to be able to read them and take them with me.

But not here: This is performance. Its essence is the personal speaking voice of the poet. You can hardly imagine it being recited by someone else, since that would lose the personal integrity that is one of its chief claims to excellence. (What do they do for understudies?)

Impressario Russell Simmons selected these nine. Director Stan Lathan adds a d.j. and stages it as a simple but propulsive series of nearly 40 brief bursts -- mainly solo turns with occasional duos, trios, etc. The opening group poem asks for a poetry of intimate revelation, excitement, political commitment and urgency such as they intend to deliver; the finale is an "I write America" litany of all the diverse anger and love we've already heard, rising to a assertive cacophony.

The poet performers are Beau Sia, Black Ice, Staceyann Chin, Steve Coleman, Mayda Del Valle, George Me, Suheir Hammad, Lemon and Poetri; Tendaji is the d.j. They are a map of ethnic and other variety -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Caribbean, Palestinian and so on. But as their poems express individual perspectives and furies, you begin modifying those limiting ethnic labels with such adjectives as comic, gay, working class, angry and hip-hop. Some of the poetry itself plays on and attacks stereotypes, but it gradually turns the poets into individuals.

Still, Strom Thurmond or George Bush wouldn't like what they hear. There's no praise of "compassionate conservatism" or the war on Iraq.

The whole is just over 100 minutes, intermission included.

Granted, this is the Broadway version of a rough counter-culture art form. No matter how much anger it expresses, it's inevitably smoothed out and packaged. (Oddly, there's no cast CD yet available.) But for a cultural tourist like me, it's an encounter to enjoy -- and theatrical, too.

At Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St.; call 1-800-432-7250.