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‘A political statement of its own’ … Koek and Lee. As rehearsals progressed at Opera East, I began to tire of the score: too sentimental, too manipulative for my Generation X sensibility. In Puccini, Larson had found a model for a story of his own experience, in a way that I hadn’t. I realise that, just as I was directing my rather conventional opera, Jonathan Larson was at the New York Theatre Workshop, developing his response to La Boheme: the musical Rent. Why didn’t I see the parallels with Puccini’s story? Too in awe, perhaps, of Bohème’s status as one of the world’s greatest operas, too concerned with understanding the technicalities of the music and the staging. Only the year before, I had lost my partner to an Aids-related illness. Back then, I was writing an early unproduced play, fending off demands for late payment of rent in a very shabby flat. Photograph: to Puccini now, I see that my 27-year-old self had a lot in common with Rodolfo and Mimi and their bohemian cohort. Matthew Kellett as Marcus and Grace Nyandoro as Marissa. I call the office and we reword the website. It’s a political statement of its own, I suppose, but not the aggressive challenge to heteronormativity that “queering Puccini” might suggest. Phil and Daniel are playing the scene so naturally and easily. Two gay men singing some of the world’s most romantic music to each other brings out a vulnerability and honesty in Daniel and Phil as performers, while feeling like a comic transgression of the unwritten rules of opera.Īt the end of the rehearsal, which takes place in a tiny room in the West End of London, I look at our website describing this production as a “queer reinvention” of Puccini and wonder, in the light of what’s happening in the rehearsal room, if that’s the right line to take. I realise they actually have very different vocal qualities, which sharpens their distinctive spirits as characters. But as we rehearse, Daniel’s Rodolfo becomes a confident, boastful figure prone to exaggeration and sentiment, while Phil’s Mimi is a tentative, uneasy presence who ultimately sees himself and the world with more mature eyes than his enthusiastic lover. Having directed a much more conventional Bohème 30 years ago, I was concerned that casting two singers of the same voice type might flatten the colours and dynamics of the duet. In our new English-language version, Rodolfo, a tenor role, meets Lucas, an online hook-up whose friends have given the nickname Mimi, and who is also sung by a tenor. It’s O Soave Fanciulla from Puccini’s La Bohème, one of the most performed scenes in the opera repertoire, written for a male and a female voice. I ’m listening to two tenors – Philip Lee and Daniel Koek – sing a love duet.