Two New York girls are being filmed sitting on the grass in Central Park. "You guys ever been to the opera?" asks the voice behind the camera. "No," says one. "But Julia Roberts went in Pretty Woman, and she had the best time."
Baz Luhrmann has included a good many of these vox pops in the video promoting his latest project, Puccini's La Bohème. The show is staged with the integrity of opera but the hype and glitz of a Broadway musical, plus the chutzpah that only a Hollywood director like Luhrmann could bring.
After several weeks of previews in San Francisco and New York, the show had its celebrity-studded opening last weekend at the Broadway Theater. Elegant posters of the stars in 1950s movie-style clinches are all over town, with the ones by the theatre bathed in the perma-daylight of Times Square glowing from down the road. This, says Luhrmann, is how he is going to bring La Bohème back to the masses: by taking it out of the opera houses and on to the popular stage, making it a viable night out for people like those girls in the park, who might never otherwise set foot in the Metropolitan or New York City Opera.
But first he has to persuade them that, unlike Julia, they don't need a posh frock, a rich man or indeed any previous knowledge of the art form to enjoy the show. Puccini's 1896 opera about the doomed love affair between Rodolfo and Mimi in bohemian Paris seems a good place to start: it is one of the most popular operas of all time.
And there have been precedents on Broadway. Gershwin's Porgy and Bess was premiered at the Alvin Theater in 1935 and ran for 124 performances, while several other less well-known 20th-century works, notably by Kurt Weill and Gian Carlo Menotti, had even more successful stagings in their day. But a celebrity name outside the theatre is no guarantee of success. Sting bombed in a version of Weill's Threepenny Opera in 1989, and the 1984 staging of Bohème as an unlikely vehicle for the pop ballad queen Linda Ronstadt is something that most people who were there seem happier to forget.
Luhrmann, however, knows exactly what he is doing. He and his designer, Catherine Martin - now his wife - were known for their theatre and opera work back in Australia long before their play Strictly Ballroom became a hit film. In 1994 his staging of Benjamin Britten's operatic setting of A Midsummer Night's Dream came to the Edinburgh festival, picking up the critics' award. And this Bohème is based very closely on the production that was his first hit for Australian Opera back in Sydney nearly 13 years ago, when he was just 27.
The show caused a stir at the time because Luhrmann insisted on casting young, unknown singers who were roughly the same age as their roles. More conservative patrons were suspicious and stayed away. But Luhrmann's good-looking cast really could sing (Mimi was played by Cheryl Barker, English National Opera's recent Tosca), and the production was such a success with a new, younger audience that the sceptical regulars were soon clamouring for tickets. Two visiting Broadway producers were impressed by what they saw, but Luhrmann's diary was full and they made do with staging Rent, the musical based on La Bohème.
Thirteen years on, Luhrmann's Bohème is far from shocking. Updated versions of the opera with youngish casts are nothing unusual now, and there are grittier ones around. But, says Luhrmann, that's not the point; revelation, not revulsion, is what's needed. In fact, there are only two things about this production that are really surprising. One is that so much is left unchanged from its 1990 incarnation. It's a little darker, maybe more stylish, but few major elements have been reworked.
The other is that it is sung in the original Italian. Projected over several screens, the surtitles use different fonts, with a comic-book typeface for the larger-than-life characters. One might have thought Luhrmann would opt for an English translation, but he is stubborn on this. The resonance of the Italian words, he says, is integral to the music, and if Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can be a hit with surtitles, why not this? Well, it's his show.
Indeed, only the very naive would deny that Luhrmann's name is the show's main selling point. But for all his characteristically uncynical and idealistic words about accessibility, only one question really matters: is this current staging any good?
Well, yes. It has plenty going for it, with the proviso that the dramatic side is carrying the musical element slightly, and existing opera lovers might find it a little underwhelming in this respect. However much pace Constantine Kitsopoulos puts into conducting his reduced orchestra, the visceral thrill and sheer size of sound that can drive the best operatic performances is mostly absent.
Yet, although none of the young performers is truly outstanding, there is a solid cast. Luhrmann and his team tried out over 2,000 singers worldwide. With eight shows a week, the two leads are played by three people each and the supporting roles shared between two. Talk to half the singers in Britain under 35 and they will tell you they auditioned. But only one made it into one of the two main leads: the tenor Alfred Boe, who was singing Rodolfo at Saturday's final preview.
Boe's career seemed to be going quite nicely as it was. As a member of the Royal Opera's prestigious Vilar Young Artists programme, he was making occasional appearances at Covent Garden, and he took the title role in Britten's Albert Herring at Glyndebourne this summer. Now he is doing a more than passable impression of a matinee idol, and brings lots of presence to Rodolfo's meaty high notes. The flaw at this performance was a sameness of colour in his voice, especially during his big aria. Wei Huang's charmingly vulnerable Mimi, along with Jessica Comeau's sparky Musetta, sounded similarly monochrome. The singers are miked - probably a necessary evil in this theatre, which was never designed for opera. But I suspect that the close-sounding amplification was slightly sapping the singers' powers of expression.
The story is updated to the late 1950s, a period familiar to a film-going audience but one in which it is still believable to have a heroine dying of tuberculosis. The look is that of a Robert Doisneau photograph. There is no illusion or disguise about the effects: the stage hands are part of the action, preparing the explosive opening of the party act as if it were a film shoot. While it's not as brash or brazen as Moulin Rouge, the production is definitely set in the same world.
What impresses most is the generally natural quality of the acting. The instant attraction between Rodolfo and Mimi, the boisterous mucking around from Rodolfo and his four flatmates, the spitfire tiffs between the supporting couple, Marcello and Musetta - all are convincingly drawn.
So can we expect more Broadway opera from Luhrmann? Maybe; he says that if Bohème does succeed in hooking new audiences, he doesn't want to lose them. And he has friends influential enough to make new productions happen, including Placido Domingo, who is now in charge of two of the largest opera companies in the US.
Meanwhile, the search has already begun for a new cast to take over if the show's run is extended. But for the moment, with performances selling out and with a steady stream of Luhrmann's A-list supporters coming through the theatre doors (David Bowie and Iman, on this particular evening), it seems that Puccini is once again the hot ticket. If those two girls in the park take the plunge, they might be lucky and get seated behind Julia.