10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE AUGUST 5, 1994

ENTERTAINMENT

Bizet's tale of love and lust in English—and America

Carmen

Music by Georges Bizet English text by Michael McConnell Lyric Opera Cleveland

Reviewed by Mike Henderson

Carmen is a cautionary tale about sex and relationships. It presents the worst-case scenario of what can happen when a person fails to make certain crucial distinctions.

At the beginning of the opera Don Jose is blessed with having a partner who loves him, who possesses all the virtues necessary to support a stable relationship, and who is even approved of by his mother. During the first act Jose encounters something radically different, someone who offers a promise of incredible sexual excitement but also a guarantee that no encounter can be anything other than short-term and tempestuous.

Don Jose has a choice, of course, but he devotes no time to weighing his alternatives. Instead he forsakes the guarantee of stability and probably quite respectable pleasure to pursue what is only a promise of excitement. By the end of the opera he has become an outlaw, committed murder, and awaits his own execution.

Depending on your set of values, Don Jose arrives at this terrible end because he fails to observe one of two crucial distinctions. Either he fails to appreciate the radical difference between stable, long-term, caring love, and short-lived, intense, but strictly physical pleasure; or he fails to realize that, however wonderful strictly physical pleasure may be, such encounters are best treated as just that, and should not be mistaken for potential long-term partnerships, which they can almost never become.

Bizet and his librettists, writing for a family theater in the very moralistic climate of 1870s France, were probably aiming to teach the former lesson. At least some modern audiences, less convinced of the irrevocable fatality of the extremes of pleasure, might find more relevance in the latter interpretation. Either way, Don Jose loses his chance for a fulfilling relationship and life because he fails to distinguish between what can only be short-term and what might well provide a lifetime of happiness.

The universal nature of this plot and the fact that even the most casual opera-goer is likely already to have seen the work several times make Carmen the sort of piece that tempts directors to try something other than a repetition of the usual. In fact, Oscar Hammerstein II even adapted the story to the American South earlier in this century with Carmen Jones.

Lyric Opera Cleveland director Michael McConnell has chosen something of a middle ground with this new production: The score has been left largely intact, but the setting and the new English translation McConnell provides are more of an adaptation than a presentation of Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy's original libretto.

During the prologue McConnell, recalling the Merimee novella on which the opera is based, presents Don Jose in his cell awaiting execution. Playing his guitar, the soldier envisions one manifestation of the force that he followed to his doom: a gypsy girl. The scene then shifts to a largely traditional first act, replete with soldiers and gypsies.

During the prelude to Act II we return to Don Jose in his cell, but this time eroticism appears to him in the form of a sultry nightclub performer. Not surprisingly, Act II itself

is set in a 1920s speakeasy and Carmen, no longer a factory worker, is now a cabaret singer, dressed and made up remarkably like Louise Brooks, cinema's early beguiling siren. Her friends and fellow smugglers are transformed into Mafia types and Escamillo, no longer a toreador, is now a motion picture star, singing the praises of the silver screen.

Act III jumps again in time and space, taking us not to the Pyrenees but to the docks of some seaport in our own time. Carmen has become something of a punk, and she and her fellow smugglers are seen unloading crates of some illicit cargo. Escamillo, on his departure, rather than inviting Carmen and the others to observe his triumph in the bull ring, passes around tickets to his latest movie. With Act IV Carmen has metamorphosed again. Now she is the lover of an operatic baritone who is about to perform the last scene of Carmen in a theater, and the act is set in the wings of an opera house.

Those familiar with nineteenth-century French opera will have noticed that McConnell, in presenting Carmen as various manifestations of the same force, has brought the opera very close to one of its contemporaries, Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. As in the Offenbach work, here the title character is no longer one individual but rather various incarnations across time and space of a volatile power that entices some men to abandon everything that could make them happy.

(Some might object that in generalizing Carmen from one woman to various women McConnell has, no doubt inadvertently, increased the inherent misogyny of a libretto that, even in its original form, links the destructive powers of unfettered eroticism uniquely to the female. I cannot help but wonder if any director, much less any audi-

ence, is yet ready to extend McConnell's adaptation in the way that would obviate such an objection.)

One of the most difficult roles to bring off successfully in this opera is Micaela, the sweet, mother-approved young lady who keeps trying to pull Don Jose back into the path of reason. Far too often she can appear to be little more than a goody two-shoes.

In this production, however, soprano Kyunghee Park worked wonders with the part, giving the character real spunk at the opening of the first act, and singing the music throughout with an often ravishingly beautiful lyric soprano. The concluding phrase of her Act III aria was a particular joy.

Julia Bentley as Carmen also shone as a singer, her dark mezzo often particularly rich and luscious even when her physical acting did not quite convey the erotic sultriness that should make Carmen so clearly different from the also beautiful but not erotic Micaela.

As Don Jose, tenor John Uhlenhopp had all the right notes and put them forth effectively. One might only regret that, while he sang the high note at the end of the Flower Song pianissimo as written but seldom performed, he broke the phrase leading up to it.

Richard Lewis had no problems conveying either the music or the personality of Escamillo.

In sum, this is an adventuresome and largely successful adaptation of a work that constant repetition often makes too easily taken for granted. Some of McConnell's adaptation, in particular his setting of the fourth act, might be questioned, but this remains a Carmen well worth attending, both for some wonderful singing and for its fresh and often convincing retelling of a universal story.

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