On track: Mimi and Rodolfo in NY

By WILLIAM DART

Seventy-eight years after the death of its composer, La Boheme has finally made it to Broadway, thanks to Baz Luhrmann. The Australian film director who gave us Moulin Rouge has taken his audience-friendly 1990 Australian Opera production of Puccini's classic to the Great White Way. The reviews of the American stage production have generally been positive and the just-released original cast recording answers many of the critical carps.

There is now a full orchestral component (there were fewer than 30 players in the Broadway pit), and we're not rendered dizzy by all the run-around in the Cafe Momus, or irritated by relentlessly hip surtitles - a selling point these, cementing the 1957 update by slangy references to Marlon Brando and beat lingo.

Directorial touches, like the synchronised typing in the introduction to Che gelida manina or a croaky Alcindoro singing in English, raise eyebrows rather than hackles.

Stout is out in Luhrmann's casting. In his attempt to make the work more accessible, he has used young unknowns and alternated three Mimi-Rodolfo pairings throughout the stage season.

Democratically, all three couples have their piece of turf on the recording, which necessitates no little suspension of disbelief for listeners. (The English tenor Alfred Boe and Chinese soprano Wei Huang linger most gracefully in my memory.)

Some singers, who have obviously worked successfully on stage, fail to make quite the expected impact on disc - Jessica Comeau's ripe-voiced Musetta is a case in point.

The recording has all the stereophonic lushness we expect of a Broadway-show album. The climaxes (and some of them are hanky-drenchers) are speaker-tremblers and yet we can also hear all the detail of Puccini's scoring, especially in his delicate use of woodwind, nicely contoured by conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos.

In these times when classical music and opera are having survival problems, this Broadway Boheme is, if not a solution, a tactic, and there's certainly no shortage of Puccini and Verdi ripe to be next on Luhrmann's list. Parsifal or Moses and Aaron might take a little more time.

* La Boheme on Broadway, Festival-Mushroom 336092