Atlanta Opera Focuses on Love & Loss at Pullman Yards
Modern dress performances of Puccini’s “La Boheme” and the Broadway hit “Rent” were offered in immersive stagings.
Tomer Zvulun, the Israeli born artistic and executive director of the Atlanta Opera, brought the company’s Boheme Project to Pullman Yards recently. The program alternated a modern dress staging of Giacomo Puccini’s “La Boheme” with the popular Broadway musical “Rent” to the cavernous facility in East Atlanta which once was used to refurbish Pullman rail cars.
It’s rare that a professional opera company would try to pull off two shows, with such different musical styles, during the same week. It is rarer still to try to do it in an improvised setting that offers so many obstacles to staged musical performances. But as Zvulun sees it, in both “La Boheme” and “Rent” the non-traditional setting helps to propel the performances forward.
“In an immerse setting like Pullman Yards, there is a musical flow that moves forward without stopping. Immersive theater is mirroring the music visually and theatrically. Nothing comes between the audience and the performers. So that the flow of the show is literally unstoppable.”
Zvulun and his frequent collaborator, Vita Zykun, who also grew up in Israel, made the best of a difficult space, with a single, sprawling stage set that gave featured performers an energetic workout while moving them frequently among several stage levels.
According to Zvulun, the two works performed consecutively gave his Atlanta Opera audience a new way to approach serious musical theater.
“We want to break the boundaries. In fact, that is the mission of opera — breaking boundaries so that opera can be enjoyed on the highest level everywhere. “Rent” and “La Boheme” are very, very unique in that they eliminate any kind of barriers of storytelling. There’s no dialog and in our staging of both works there are no physical barriers between the performers and the audience.”
What also united the two productions at Pullman Yards with the more traditional production of the Puccini opera last spring at the Cobb Energy Center was that both explore how to live and love while struggling against the crushing burden of terminal illness and economic uncertainty.
In the original “La Boheme,” the life-threatening illness was tuberculosis, which terrified audiences at the end of the 19th century. In “Rent,” almost exactly 100 years later it was AIDS, which claimed so many great theater talents in the prime of life. Those lost to the disease included Michael Bennett, who shook up Broadway with his production of “A Chorus Line,” and Bob Fosse, the brilliant choreographer. At Pullman Yards, the contemporary “La Boheme” staging centers on the deadly COVID-19 that struck down so many before a vaccine could be developed. In a fateful coincidence, the talented young creator of “Rent,” Jonathan Larson, died just 35 hours before his work was to debut.
After a lifetime of struggle that is partially mirrored in the story on stage, Larson succumbed without warning to a fatal, but undiagnosed heart condition. Before he died, he had this to say about his epic work of survival.
“In these dangerous times, where it seems that the world is ripping apart at the seams, we can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day and should reach out to each other and bond as a community, rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium.”
The acclaim from young audiences helped propel the show to a Pulitzer Prize and four top Emmy awards. It went on to 12 years of performances on Broadway. The production grossed $280 million and was staged abroad in 25 different languages.
It featured a diverse cast of newcomers that told the show’s story of young people who had been marginalized by society.
Changing time and place is just one way that Zvulun says he works to make new audiences more comfortable with the material.
“I come from humble beginnings in Israel, from Ashkelon, where opera is not something we grew up with,” he said. “My family was working class, My passion is to make opera accessible and available. It’s about feeling welcome, and I want to make sure everybody in Atlanta feels welcome.”
In addition to the non-traditional staging and the unconventional choice of material, like “Rent,” the Atlanta Opera staged a performance this year of a one-woman opera in The Temple’s sanctuary Midtown on Holocaust Remembrance Day and has developed a sophisticated video studio during the past several years for online screenings of recorded performances for anyone who cares to view them.
For Zvulun, the company he continues to inspire has as the goal of their performances to make them as socially and personally relevant as they can make them.
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