Good old Puccini, he knew how to write for his musicians. Take, for example, La bohème, which NZ Opera brings to the stage for the first time since 2018. Casting a bunch of opera singers as impoverished artists isn’t exactly a stretch, is it, especially in this part of the world?
“I think it’s typecasting to be honest,” deadpans Australian baritone Samuel Dundas, who takes the role of Marcello. “Yes, he’s impoverished, but I get the sense that the bohemians chose that lifestyle. Marcello’s whole existence is actually like a hipster who just hasn’t found his graphic design job yet.”
Marcello is Dundas’s signature role, a character he’s played numerous times. Is it possible to bring a fresh direction to a path so well-trodden?
“Because I’ve done this role as many times as I have, I cherish him,” Dundas says, “but every time I finish a season, I think, ‘Do I have anything left to offer him, and by association the production?’ But then you take a break from him and your own life changes, and the things going on in your life always inform the way you see a character and their position in the world.”
Handily, then, Dundas has recently been living his own bohemian existence. After several years in Tasmania, he is currently of no fixed abode, travelling from job to job with his wife and young son. It’s less about being a wandering minstrel than an act of self-care. He had always experienced stage fright, but after his son was born in 2021 Dundas had what he describes as a “massive anxiety attack”, and finally sought help, through therapy and medication.
“[That episode] made me realise I’d suffered from it my entire life and had set up a whole bunch of procedures where I was curating everything going on in my life in order to keep it at bay, without knowing what I was attempting to keep at bay.”
Dundas now finds the stage a less fearful place.
“Sitting in my dressing room and having butterflies and sweaty palms, I now know these are just the normal signs of nervousness. And that little devil inside my head, who had been chewing up the majority of my processing power with negative talk, was gone. It’s been completely career changing.”
The new, improved Dundas has been in high demand. It’s required him to constantly leave his family behind as he flies to the next job – hence the new lifestyle as a family of travellers, before they slowly wend their way back to the Australian mainland. “We’ve been able to make it work and while we can, we will. I take the greatest joy when people ask, ‘Where are you moving to?’” He smiles. “We don’t know.”
NZ Opera, Puccini’s La bohème: Auckland, May 29-June 6; Wellington, June 18-22; Christchurch, July 2-6.
