Opera Company's "Carmen' (2nd review)

Prosper Merimée's 1845 novella Carmen is one of the little masterpieces of 19th-Century French literature. Even today, its acid trenchancy has a decidedly modern air. Georges Bizet's operatic treatment is a masterpiece on its own terms, but the terms are far different from the source.

Romantic opera was spectacle before anything else, with all the Verdiesque trappings: crowd scenes, big choruses, swelling arias. Being French, Bizet treated these conventions with an ironic air, but he honored them nonetheless.

Modern taste has sometimes yearned to get closer to the astringent spirit of Merimée's tale, as in Rodion Shchedrin's Carmen ballet, which, reducing Bizet's three-hour opera to a 40-minute work, rescores the original music for a tart combination of strings and percussion.

Productions of the opera itself have sometimes opted for modern dress, including a previous version by the Opera Company of Philadelphia. But the Carmen just staged at the Academy of Music wouldn't have been out of place in belle époque Paris.

Sets and costumes evoked the period, and crowd scenes had a stylized realism. Bizet's lyricism flowed unimpeded, which is to say unreconsidered. The well-worn plot— nice soldier boy falls for faithless gypsy, throws over his fiancée, ruins his career and opts for murder-suicide— begs to have its darker accents highlighted, and those accents can be found in the score itself.

Fading into the crowd

Rinat Shaham brought out Carmen's rebellious, anarchic sexuality well enough, but David Pomeroy never touched the nerve of Don José until their final scene together, far too late for dramatic credibility.

Jonathan Beyer's Escamillo, though jaunty enough, was also too bland for the occasion. True, he has less at stake, for Escamillo merely wants to take his pleasure: A matador is no more to be commanded by his woman than by his bull. But there is a good deal more to get out of his character than that.

The really difficult role, however, is that of the virtuous Micaëla, Don José's dishonored fiancée. In her first scene with Don José she sings the praises of his mother so insistently that we wonder whom he is supposed to be engaged to. Micaëla's character in general seems so saccharine, and so at odds with the rogues and adventurers who populate the rest of the drama, that it seems next to impossible to make anything credible of her.

Surpassing purity

But a miracle occurs in Act III when Micaëla tracks Don Jose down in the bandits' lair to which he's been driven— the sort of miracle that can only occur in opera. Bizet gives Micaëla an aria of such surpassing purity and beauty that we can see in her at last the glimpse of genuine goodness that sets the fallen world around her in perspective.

The soprano Ailyn Pérez absolutely nailed this scene, and the audience gave her the only sustained ovation of the show. Normally, operatic applause is merely disruptive, but in this case it was almost integral to the scene. The audience simply didn't want the vision Ms. Pérez had embodied— the vision of a better if not quite possible world— to fade.

Mishandled knife fight

Minor characters were capably sketched in, and Eric Dubin's bandit chieftain had particular dash and vigor. Allen Charles Klein's basic set design— two outthrust Romanesque walls bridged by an aqueduct— was attractive and serviceable except for Act IV, where it brooded too much over a cropped front arena backstopped by a wall. David Gateley's production moved smoothly if conventionally, and the crowd scenes had fluidity.

What should have been a central moment, however— Don Jose's knife fight with Escamillo— was inept in the extreme, and only highlighted the general shortcoming of the two male leads. As a spectacle, this Carmen succeeded well enough. What it needed, and lacked, was edge.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.